Archive for the ‘News’ Category
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Papuans with HIV/AIDS to get microchips
PAPUA (The Jakarta Post) - Amid protests from Papuans and NGOs, the Papua provincial legislative council is set to pass a bylaw on HIV/AIDS that includes a controversial article requiring certain people living with the disease to be implanted with a microchip.
"If the draft bylaw is passed, it will violate the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS because they will be implanted with microchips," said Constan Karma, executive director of the Papua AIDS Commission (KPAD).
Councilor John Manangsang said the microchips would only be implanted in people living with HIV/AIDS who were deemed to be "aggressive".
"Aggressive means actively seeking sexual intercourse. This is one way to protect healthy people," he said.
"Do not misunderstand human rights; if we respect the rights of the people living with HIV/AIDS, then we must also respect the rights of healthy people."
He said the public should judge the bylaw draft as a whole rather than by its constituent articles. "The draft, for example, requires everyone to take HIV/AIDS tests so that preventative measures can be taken early on," he said.
Angel Flassy, for The Jakarta Post -
NACO pulled up for substandard HIV kits in country
NEW DELHI: Ten months after the World Bank published a report alleging rampant fraud and corruption in Indian healthcare projects including supply of sub-standard HIV testing kits, the Central Information Commission (CIC) has pulled up the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) in connection with the charges.
NACO will now have to explain the "factual position" with regards to the allegations of sub-standard HIV diagnostic kits supplied by a private player and documents related to investigations by World Bank in the matter.
The CIC issued a show cause notice to NACO, the nodal agency handling HIV control strategies and their implementation in the country, asking it to explain why the maximum fine of Rs 25,000 should not be slapped on the organisation for withholding requisite information when demanded.
Hearing the petition of R Venkataraman, who sought all the documents of related investigations in the matter from NACO, the CIC directed the organisation "to provide the appellant with the DIR report of the World Bank along with the factual position with regard to HIV Kits in India and NACO's recommendations based on the World Bank report".
DNA Now -
ICC celebrates fifth anniversary of HIV/AIDS partnership
Dubai: The International Cricket Council (ICC) will celebrate five years of raising awareness and reducing the stigma of HIV by running a series of activities to mark World AIDS Day on December 1.
Players taking part in major international matches will wear red ribbons, as a global show of support for people living with HIV, while the India and England teams will meet young people affected by HIV ahead of the seventh ODI in Delhi, an ICC statement said.
Since 2003, when it became the first international sports organisation to form a partnership with UNAIDS, the ICC has also worked with United Nations agencies and non-governmental organisations including UNICEF and the Global Media AIDS Initiative (GMAI), to deliver a variety of activities aimed at raising awareness of HIV/AIDS.
Highlights of the partnership have included such profile-raising initiatives as running public service announcements featuring some of the worlds leading players including Graeme Smith, Kumar Sangakkara and Mahendra Singh Dhoni; player visits to schools and orphanages at ICC events; and an HIV-positive individual tossing the coin before the start of the Pakistan-India Test series in Rawalpindi in 2004.
Such was the level of support in 2007 at the ICC Cricket World Cup in the West Indies and ICC World Twenty20 in South Africa, 24 separate player visits to community projects took place, illustrating the enormous player support that the ICCs partnership on HIV/AIDS receives.
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MSF warns Indian govt of developed countries’ attempt to trap generics under counterfeit drugs
The far cry against the WHO's attempt to give a new definition to counterfeit drugs is mounting day by day. Close on the heels of the Indian industry expressing concern over the WHO proposal, an international humanitarian medical aid organization Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) has urged the Indian government to keep away from the developed countries' deliberate attempt to confuse the two totally different issues of substandard drugs and counterfeit drugs which is designed to trap the legally manufactured generic drugs from developing countries under the definition of counterfeiting.
"By confusing the issues of counterfeit medicines and substandard medicines, WHO and governments are attacking the wrong problem, which does nothing to improve the quality of medicines, which is a far greater public health concern. Counterfeit is a trademark and IPR issue that should not be confused with quality issues," MSF's project manager for India Leena Menghaney said.
In a letter to Union health minister Dr Anbumani Ramadoss, the MSF urged the Indian government to project a true picture in this regard at the forthcoming international meeting called by IMPACT of the WHO on giving new definition to counterfeit drugs. India's role at these negotiations will strengthen negotiations by developing countries to prevent such trade barriers from being created.
DCGI Dr Surinder Singh and joint secretary in the Union health ministry Debashish Panda are scheduled to attend the meeting to be held in Germany on November 24 and 25.
Ramesh Shanker, for Pharmabiz.com -
In Transit – India has time to reverse its HIV epidemic: expert
INDIA SHOULD use its legendary IT skills to drive its health sector programmes, including HIV/AIDS information and treatment. "The world learned from India when its pharma companies saved over 3.5 million people from sure death by providing affordable AIDS medicine. India should similarly use its IT skills for its own health sector and ensure everyone everywhere has access to information and healthcare facilities," said Jeffery O'Malley, director, HIV/AIDS group, Bureau of Development Policy, UNDP, in an exclusive to Hindustan Times.
India still has time to reverse its HIV epidemic, with states already showing results. IV prevalence in the general population in Maharashtra dropped from 0.80 per cent to 0.74 per cent in 200506, and in Tamil Nadu, from 0.47 per cent to 0.39 per cent. "Unlike in Africa, HIV infection in India is driven by a small identifiable proportion of the popula- tion-female sex workers, migrants, injecting drug users and MSMs-and working with them is very effective," said O'Malley.
India has 2.5 million people living with HIV, with infection being a high 5.69 per cent among Men who have Sex with Men (MSM) and 5.38 percent Female Sex Workers (FSWs). Most government programmes target female sex workers and their clients through condom promotion and information campaigns.
Issues related to gay rights have been a real disaster in India, as in the rest of the world, said O'Malley.
"Governments the world over find it easier to talk about female sex workers than men who have sex with men. Even when the Gates Foundation started HIV interventions in India, the focused on female sex workers and injecting drug users. To their credit, they now work with men who have sex with men (MSMs), though it's mostly with commercial MSMs. While infection is reversing in sex workers in states like Tamil Nadeu and Andhra, it is increasing among MSMs across the country," he said.
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Indonesia to track HIV patients with chips under skin?
JAKARTA: Lawmakers in Indonesias remote province of Papua have thrown their support behind a controversial bylaw requiring some HIV/AIDS patients to be implanted with microchips -part of extreme efforts to monitor the disease.
Health workers and rights activists sharply criticized the plan on Monday. But legislator John Manangsang said by implanting small computer chips beneath the skin of "sexually aggressive" patients, authorities would be in a better position to identify, track and punish those who deliberately infect others with up to six months in jail or a $5,000 fine.
The technical and practical details still need to be hammered out, he and others said, but the proposal has received full backing from the provincial parliament and, if it gets a majority vote as expected, will officially be declared a bylaw next month.
Times of India -
A Workshop on HIV/AIDS Behavioural research
A social & Behavioural research Workshop Focusing on HIV /AIDS
January 5 - 16, 2009
TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES
POST BOX No. 8313,
VN. PURAV MARG DEONAR,
MUMBAI 400088
This workshop is organized by Albert Einstein College of Medicine's AIDS INTERNATIONAL TRAINING & RESEARCH PROGRAM (AITRP); cosponsored by Einstein/MMC Center for AIDS Research (CFAR) and TATA INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES (TISS)
Faculty
Laurie Bauman, PhD AEECOM
Shalini Bharat, PhD TISS
Rosy chhabra, PsyD AECOM
Anil Kumar, PhD TISS
Ruth Macklin, PhD AECOM
Shubhada Maitra, PhD TISS
Bruce Rapkin, PhD AEEOM
Ellen Silver, PhD AECOM
Asha Banu Soletti, PhD TISS
Ruth Stein, MD AECOM
Sonia Suchday, PhD AECOM
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Telling our secrets
Venkatesh Routh lives with his wife and two-year-old son in Mancherial, a small city in the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. Three nights a week he says goodbye to his wife, who is nine months pregnant, and goes to the railway station. But instead of getting on a train he walks to the end of the brightly lit platform, past the chai-wallah selling hot sweet tea, to the point where the floodlights go no further. Here he steps into a maze of dirt paths and thorny bushes. There are no women, and the men have all come for the same reason: to have sex with other men.
"I come here in secret," says Venkatesh, standing in the dark. A train clatters past, horn blaring. "I am a kothi [effeminate homosexual]. I didn't want to get married, but my family members pressured me. Every day for three years they kept asking, 'Why don't you marry?'"
"When I started coming here for sex I'd heard the word 'Aids', but I didn't know how you get it. I didn't know how to use a condom," he says. "Now I show other people how to use them properly."
As 29-year-old Venkatesh fills up the condom box bolted to a crumbling wall among the bushes, he is taking part in what looks to be one of the most promising HIV prevention efforts in the developing world in recent years. All over Andhra Pradesh, men who have sex with other men - who may or may not think of themselves as gay or bisexual and who are often married with families - are forming community groups and helping each other to solve their own problems. Venkatesh is one of them.
One in seven men who have sex with men in Andhra Pradesh is HIV positive according to the state government. They are almost 20 times more likely to be infected with HIV than the average Indian adult (the national adult prevalence rate is 0.36%). This is because unprotected anal sex with multiple partners carries a high risk of HIV, and because discrimination drives men who have sex with men underground.
Sylvia Rowley, for guardian.co.uk -
HIV/AIDS in India: Narrow Focus, Inflated Projections & Poverty
On August 5, 2008 a young "HIV-positive" couple in Mumbai - Babu Ishwar Thevar, 39, his wife Amothi, 33 - committed suicide after killing their three children, sons Venkatesh and Mani, ages 10 and 8, and daughter Mahalaxmi, 6. They had just discovered that their youngest child too "was infected by the deadly virus."
The stigma of AIDS has taken many lives long before the disease itself claimed them, but the extent of such suicides, and the reasons behind them, have rarely come to public knowledge. AIDS has a critical link to the immune system and the factors that influence it. Society's limited understanding of this disease is causing innocent people to pay a terrible price.
At a time when we do not have a cure for AIDS, we cannot assume to know its cause. Increasingly across the world, there are voices questioning the perpetuation of a "Frankenstein that has been blown out of all proportion." They question the narrow approach to a single disease, especially the huge financing for AIDS over all else in basic health care. Though welcome and long overdue, this debate must now move further. Our approach to this disease needs to change for the sake of families like that of Babu and Amothi Thevar.
Narrow Focus
In 1993, I was one of the first health correspondents in India to serve on the staff of a leading daily English language newspaper. I had just completed a journalist fellowship at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, and came back deeply influenced by teachers such as the late Dr. Jonathan Mann, a public health expert with renowned international experience. He believed that the discovery of a new disease like AIDS was an opportunity to scrutinize fundamental issues - such as the link between disease and poverty, the need to examine the workings of the entire health system, access to preventive health information and the means to support health in all its physical, mental and social dimensions.
Based in Mumbai, I witnessed the unfolding of the "HIV/AIDS epidemic" in what was dubbed the "AIDS capital of India" and extensively reported on it over the course of a decade. At that time, the medical community shunned treatment of this disease.
Rupa Chinai
© 2008 Wake Up Pune.
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'Paragrams' by WPSHOWER
