We're # 1!

Thats right, its true, we're number 1 in the world in something. Last week, the UNAIDS brought out a report that said that India has finally overtaken South Africa as the world with the largest number of AIDS affected. To South Africa's 5.5 million, we now have 5.7 million.

Given the pusillanimity of the government over the issue, and the basic messed up societal structure that we live in, I can see this figure to rise considerably in the future. When I say messed up societal structure, it is not something definite, but rather, a combination of various factors that have killed openness and common sense in our society.

There is a stand-up comedian of Indian origin named Russell Peters, and in one of his routines, he says something to this effect, "Indians are the most hypocritical people in the world. We are not supposed to talk about sex and yet we have the second highest population in the world. Somebody's fucking!"

And its the same point that I am trying to make. Its high time we stopped calling children the gifts of God and take responsibility for bringing them into this world. There are thousands of children on our city streets that are only there because their parents are too poor to feed them, and thus send them out to beg. What about state support for the city poor? Ha ha, i'm only kidding! When do you think the state has supported any of its people? Well, the people who actually need help. The state's all for maximum support to the underserving. Politicians and their posse come to mind immediately.

Thats one thing, the lack of healthcare among the urban poor, which I think is the biggest cause of this rise. Sex workers fall into this category of urban poor, and the state and any independent healthcare organization has failed to reach out to the thousands out there who are denied basic health facilities and instead looked down upon. I think only recently did the sex workers in certain cities such as Kolkata and Chennai organized themselves and demanded better living standards.

Mumbai is the AIDS capital of India. I read an article a few years ago about how it spreads. Being the commercial capital of India, at any given moment, there are thousands of commercial men in the city. These include anybody from the biggest CEO to the truck driver for a small contractor. From the thousands of truckers that come into the city, some avail the services of the sex workers, who have AIDS already, and once they fornicate, they carry the virus with them. And thus the virus spreads far and wide. I read this article a few days ago that almost half the sex workers in few of the southern states are HIV positive.

Not that this problem hasn't been recognized by some concerned people. NGO's have been giving out free condoms to sex workers in many cities and the sex workers themselves insist that their clients wear them. But nothing will happen till there is a concerted effort from the state to make this into a pan-Indian movement. But then, the politicians don't really care, and why should they, when the people who elect them don't really care themselves.

The fact that we now have the most HIV positive people in the world shows that respective Governments have constantly failed to make even an iota of effort to take care of the situation. There has been a lot of lip service, but I have yet to come across success stories from the field.

Now begins the series of articles that validate that this situation is slowly getting out of hand in the entire country.

INDIA: Human trafficking in the northeast fuelling HIV/AIDS - report

a study across eight states in this resource-rich, infrastructure-poor, conflict-scarred region seeks to highlight a new worry: the rising tide of human trafficking - mostly women and girls - and its potential for hastening the spread of HIV/AIDS.

The seven-month long study carried out by the Nedan Foundation, an Indian NGO working in the largely isolated region, was sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and is expected to be released soon.

"Poverty and conflict are fuelling trafficking in the north eastern states. This opens up huge possibilities for the spread of HIV. It is high time programmes address the problems," Digambar Narzary, head of the Nedan Foundation, said.

"We visited 25 relief camps of internally displaced persons [IDPs] in Kokrajhar in Bodoland Territorial Council, Assam [state]. Nearly 200,000 people are living in these camps without proper food. Traffickers carry out recruitment drives in such relief camps. They make false promises of jobs as domestic help in big cities," he said.

An influx of migrants over the past few decades into northeast India from neighbouring areas has sparked ethnic conflicts over land, leading to demands for secession and political autonomy.

Narzary noted that more than 100 young women had gone missing from the camps over the past two years. Regional analysts fear that such "missing girls" may have been sold into sexual slavery or "temporarily married" – often a euphemism for prostitution. The fear is that many such girls are extremely susceptible to HIV/AIDS and that many have already been infected.

India now holds the second largest absolute number of HIV infections in the world, UNAIDS has said. With more than 5 million people living with HIV in the adult population in 2004, India accounts for almost 13 percent of global HIV prevalence.

But with little reliable research, the trafficking problem is more widespread in the region than previously thought. Interviews by Nedan's field teams with 60 teenage sex workers at Dimapur, a border town in the north eastern state of Nagaland, revealed that many of the girls had been trafficked from the Naga countryside with false promises of sales jobs in big cities.

Sexual transmission is driving India's AIDS epidemic, according to UNAIDS. This route accounts for approximately 86 percent of HIV infections in the world's second most populous country. The remaining 14 percent are through blood transfusion, mother-to-child-transmission and injecting drug use, particularly in north eastern states and some metropolitan cities.

Narzary hopes that the report's key findings, such as these from the eight states, will spur the Indian government, as well as NGOs, to come forward with initiatives to reduce the level of human trafficking in the region and thereby lessen the spread of HIV/AIDS in this troubled part of the country.
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AIDS cases rate highest in India: UN

India now has the largest number of AIDS infections as the spread of the disease shows no sign of letting up a quarter-century into an epidemic that has claimed 25 million lives, the UN says.
The data shows that India has 5.7 million people living with HIV/AIDS, surpassing South Africa's 5.5 million.

However, the percentage of India's adult population with HIV-0.9 per cent, is still far lower than in parts of southern Africa, where the infection rate is well into the double digits.

Intensive AIDS prevention efforts among prostitutes and the men who frequent them have pushed down HIV infections dramatically in four south Indian states, according to a recent University of Toronto study.

The study found a 35 per cent drop in HIV among people aged 15-24 years because of efforts by authorities and non-governmental groups to educate sex workers.

Only nine percent of pregnant women in poor countries are receiving services, such as access to drugs, to help prevent mother-to-child transmission, despite a UNAIDS goal of 80 per cent coverage.

Women's vulnerability to the disease continues to increase, with more than 17 million women infected worldwide with nearly half the global total, and more than three-quarters of them living in sub-Saharan Africa, the report found.

Stigma and discrimination also still plague those infected with the virus, and young people's knowledge about HIV/AIDS remains low with less than 50 per cent having adequate information about the disease.
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And the Government of India does what the Governments of India have always been doing, deny, deny, deny.

India brushes off UN's Aids reports

India rejected on Wednesday a United Nations report that said it had overtaken South Africa to become the country with highest number of people living with HIV."I am very surprised with the UNAIDS report," Indian Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told reporters."I totally disagree with it."

Tuesday's report from UNAIDS, the UN's Aids prevention agency, said there were an estimated 5,7 million Indians living with the deadly virus at the end of 2005 against South Africa's 5,5 million cases. But Ramadoss said he stood by the Indian estimate of 5,2 million cases.

He also disagreed with the UNAIDS figures showing only about seven percent of infected people in India were getting the antiretroviral drugs needed to prolong their lives. Ramadoss said the real figure of people on antiretroviral medicines was higher, but he didn't give any figures

Denis Broun, India coordinator for UNAIDS said the UN body had reached a "more accurate" figure by widening its survey to include all age groups. Previous surveys only considered people between the ages of 15 and 49.The new figure includes 50 000 children believed to be living with HIV and previously not included in official data.But Broun praised India's HIV prevention programme, which has focused on encouraging condom use among high risk groups including prostitutes.

A report in the medical journal Lancet this year said the prevalence of HIV in 15-to-24-year-olds dropped by more than a third in the southern states of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, home to three-quarters of those living with the virus in India.