India sitting on AIDS bomb?

NEW DELHI: Is India on the threshold of an AIDS disaster? The debate triggered last month by Richard Feacham — executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria — refuses to die down. Indian NGOs and experts have joined issue with the state-run National AIDS Control Organisation which had quickly dismissed Feacham’s warning as "misleading".
According to Feacham, India has outstripped South Africa and has more people living with AIDS than any other country.While UNAIDS puts the Indian figure at 5.1 million, Feacham said that, with the speed at which the disease was spreading, the figure in India must by now exceed the South African figure of 5.3 million.
Feacham suspected that the figure in India might already have crossed 1 per cent of the population and what really set the alarm bells ringing was this observation made by him in a letter to NACO: "We know from a number of other countries that the epidemic can grow from a fraction of 1 per cent of the population to 10 per cent or even 20 per cent within a decade."
NACO officials claim Feacham later clarified in a letter that his statement had been distorted. His clarification was "almost in an apologetic tone", one official said.
Even as NACO director-general SY Quraishi asserts that 5.1 million is the correct figure, certified by WHO, UNAIDS and Indian Council of Medical Research, some experts put the figure at 8 million.
In fact some fear that the figure could be as high as 10 billion. Quraishi said that fresh data were being analysed now and the figures this year would surely be higher than last year’s 5.1 million, "but the increase is not 5 lakh a year."
Quraishi claimed that the international bodies certifying the HIV positive cases in India have said that it is in the range of 2.5 million to 7 million. "Even if we take the average of the range, it comes to approximately 5 million," Quraishi said. "That is 0.9 per centof the total adult population and 0.5 per cent of the total Indian population. South Africa’s 5.3 million cases form 23 per centof their population, while Botswana has 39 per cent and Swaziland 33 per cent affected," he added.
According to Dr Dilip Sen, president of the Indian Association of Blood Banks, the official figures on AIDS are not based on properly assessed inputs. He said NACO figures were based only on HIV reactive cases reported by 700 voluntary counselling and testing centres (VCTC) in the country and from government laboratories. He said that NACO does not accept HIV reactive cases picked up in hundreds of non-government laboratories. Then there are numerous HIV reactive cases found in private labs and unlicensed blood banks, he added.