Freedom to live with HIV | Suniti Solomon

[Guest guest]

My biggest fear is a resistant virus'

Aug 14 2009 She was a little over 13 when she was kidnapped and forced into the

sex trade. In 1986, this young girl was one of the first six people in India

that Suniti detected as being infected by the human immunodeficiency

virus, or HIV.

Since then, Chennai-based 's life has revolved around people affected by

AIDS, the condition that HIV causes. " The minute someone says he or she is HIV

positive, the word which crops up in most people's mind is `immoral', " says

69-year-old Dr , sitting in her office in south Chennai. " She was the

first girl we tested that I spoke to, and she changed me. "

The young girl, who resisted her assailants for three days, gave in after being

starved for 72 hours. Six months later, she managed to escape, reached a remand

home in Mylapore and was one of the 100 sex workers that tested. After

spending six years at the remand home, she joined Dr 's non-profit YR

Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE), established in 1993,

but died soon after.

" It was frightening really, " says Dr , herself the only girl among eight

children born to the Gaitondes, a Chennai-based Maharashtrian Hindu family in

the leather trade. " My husband was a little worried and didn't want me to work

with HIV-positive patients, most of whom at that time were homosexuals, those

who self-injected drugs and sex workers. And I said, look, you have to listen to

their stories and you wouldn't say the same thing. "

The former teacher of medicine continues to be a counsellor, matchmaker, doctor,

researcher and educationist for HIV patients. While most of the work in this

field in India is geared towards spreading awareness about the disease, Dr

's organization provides medical help, counselling and employment

opportunities for HIV/AIDS patients.

Her interest in medicine was triggered by the health officer's annual visits to

the Gaitonde home, when the eight children would line up for smallpox vaccine

shots. She studied at the Madras Medical College, where she met her husband, a

cardiac surgeon.

For a little under a decade, she trained in pathology in Britain, the US and

Australia, while travelling with her husband. But in 1973 the couple returned to

settle in India, and work at a government-run hospital.

She went on to do her doctorate in medicine (MD) in microbiology and after

serving as an assistant professor for a few years at the Madras Medical College,

became a professor. That is when Dr , who was reading up on HIV/AIDS,

decided to track the virus in India. With no openly gay community in the country

in the 1980s—the first cases of HIV in the US were detected among gay men—she

and one of her doctoral students decided to check the blood samples of female

sex workers in Chennai. " The results of the first six tests were frightening, "

she recalls.

According to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, an estimated

2.5 million people in India are HIV-positive or are afflicted by AIDS—the third

largest population, after South Africa and Nigeria, among the 33 million people

affected by the virus worldwide. " Even if three million are infected, only

20-30% of them know their status, " Dr says.

The weekly traffic at the YRG CARE clinic has gone up by 10 times since 1993; it

now has 12,000 registered patients. More and more people are able to live longer

with the help of drugs that in some cases now cost just 2% of the earlier rate.

But what is distressing to Dr is the rising percentage of Indian women

infected by this virus (from 10% of the affected population in the 1990s to 50%

now) even though 80% of them have single partners. Several Indian men often

don't disclose their illness to their families and give in to parental pressures

to marry, endangering the life of an uninfected woman. Even if the man practises

safe sex after counselling, there comes a time when the wife wants a child. " In

some part of India, being childless is still a bigger stigma than being

HIV-positive, " adds Dr , who herself faced a lot of societal pressures

before she had her son, nearly 13 years after her marriage.

For Dr , the biggest joy is when she tests children of infected parents,

usually brought in at 18 months, and the result is negative. At the time of our

interview, her fridge was stocked with Mysore pak, a sweet, because a girl who

had been brought to the centre had tested negative. Her HIV-positive mother had

contracted the virus after a transfusion.

The problems persist. Parental disclosure to HIV-positive children is an issue

most elders choose to postpone. And then there is the constant pressure of

ensuring her patients take the prescribed medicine. " My biggest fear is a

resistant virus, " says Dr . " Then we would need new drugs, which means

more money for research to find new drugs. "

http://www.livemint.com/2009/08/14210824/Freedom-to-live-with-HIV--Sun.html?h=B