Every month, 500 more kids to go on ART
In a massive scale-up of life-saving anti-retroviral treatment (ART) for paediatric cases, 500 new HIV infected children are being placed on ART every month by India's National AIDS Control Programme.
Paediatric HIV drugs are also being made available in all the 174 ART centres in India so that children get equal importance against adults as far as treatment for the deadly disease is concerned.
ART will increase the lifespan of these infected children by 10-15 years. The Health Ministry has also cleared the setting up of seven state-of-the-art paediatric ART centres in Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Imphal which will not only help scale up India’s paediatric HIV programme but will also deal with complicated cases of drug resistance among such infected children.
According to NACO, India is home to 100,000 HIV infected children of which 40,000 urgently require ART to survive. However, only 10,000 such children are receiving the treatment. India has a stock of paediatric doses of ART to treat 15,000 children which has been donated to NACO by the Clinton Foundation.
The immune system in childhood is underdeveloped and acquiring HIV infection early in a child's life thwarts its further development.
Source: TOI, 17th International AIDS Conference, Mexico
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"Enabling environment that can ensure HIV prevention services for all who need them is key to overcoming the HIV epidemic," says Health Minister, Dr. Ramadoss addressing delegates at 17th International AIDS Conference in Mexico City
Aug, 08."India's dedicated focus on HIV prevention is fetching dividends. We are seeing the beginning of the stabilization of the HIV epidemic in India," said Dr. Anbumani Ramadoss, Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Government of India. He was addressing experts and delegates at the 17th International Conference on AIDS in Mexico City. "We must not be complacent, however," he cautioned, stressing that "the key to overcoming the HIV epidemic is to take HIV services to those on the margins of society and we can only do that in an enabling environment."
India's targeted HIV intervention approach which relies on strong community participation has resulted in larger numbers of people accessing HIV prevention, treatment and care services. Responding to questions from the delegates, the Minister expressed his strong support for the draft legislation on HIV which is currently being whetted by the Law Ministry. "Structural discrimination against those who are vulnerable to HIV such as sex workers and MSM must be removed if our prevention, care and treatment programs are to succeed," he said. "Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code, which criminalizes Men who have sex with Men, must go."
India has about 2.5 million HIV infections and many states have started recording a stabilization of the epidemic. However, hotspots of HIV infection are emerging in northern India, particularly in the rural interiors, which are home to thousands of migrants who work outside their states in India's economic hubs like Mumbai and Surat. "Initiatives that address the unique needs of migrants must be immediately launched to avert a potential rise of HIV infections among migrant populations," said Ms.K.Sujatha Rao, Additional Secretary and Director General of the National AIDS Control Organization, India's apex body leading the country's response to HIV and AIDS.
India has begun a massive scale up of prevention care and treatment strategies to achieve universal coverage by 2011 through the National AIDS Control Program- III which was launched last year. Has the HIV Epidemic Peaked?
The HIV epidemic appears to have stabilized around the world, according to "Has the HIV epidemic peaked?" Although the rate of new infections has probably peaked in all world regions, the absolute number of HIV-positive individuals is expected to continue to grow in sub-Saharan Africa and remain near current levels worldwide-posing an ongoing challenge to public health programs. As a result of continued high rates of population growth and only moderate success of prevention programs in reducing HIV incidence, a large number of adolescents and adults are still likely to become infected.
Most of the world's 33.2 million HIV-positive individuals are likely to die of AIDS-related illnesses eventually. Further, with 2.5 million people being newly infected every year, the death toll from AIDS will remain high over the coming years.
The findings also indicate that the percent of the population infected with HIV has stabilized everywhere in the world over the past decade except in Eastern Europe-where prevalence rates are expected to reach their highest point this year.
Worldwide approximately 0.8 percent of adults-ages 15-49-are infected with HIV. HIV prevalence is 1 percent or lower in all major world regions except in sub-Saharan Africa, where it is 5 percent. Although trends vary, a general pattern in the past growth of the epidemic has been identified: a slow spread of the AIDS virus in the early 1980s or 1990s, followed by a period of rapid expansion, before reaching a relatively stable level. The appearance of a plateau implies that HIV is present in a small proportion of the population but that it does not generally spread beyond one or more subgroups.
The main explanation for this finding is that population sub-groups have widely varying risks for infection. Sex workers and their clients, needle-sharing intravenous drug users, and homosexuals are the most vulnerable. Men and women living in monogamous unions or without sexual partners are at the opposite end of the spectrum. At first, the virus spreads quickly among the groups at highest risk, but then transmission slows when the individuals in those groups become infected or die, and the lower-risk groups remain uninfected. An epidemic reaches a plateau when the virus has achieved maximum penetration of the vulnerable groups. This point was reached in most countries by the early 2000s.
Declining prevalence rates in several countries are consistent with the view that current prevention efforts have had an impact. Despite these encouraging trends, high-risk behavior remains pervasive, and HIV continues to spread in much of the world.
Source: Population Council's peer-reviewed journal Population and Development Review
June 2008
