Year 2030 target to make India free of menace
It is good news that HIV infections have drastically come down in India. When the nation was dangerously poised to be the AIDS capital of the world two decades ago, health experts were of the view that the disease could take the form of an epidemic. But today, India has come to a position where it’s in a position to put an end to the dreaded illness by 2030. On the occasion of World AIDS Day, the Union Minister for Health and Family Welfare, JP Nadda, said: “We have arrested the epidemic successfully. There has been 57 per cent reduction in the incidences of new infection and 29 per cent decline in the number of AIDS-related deaths.” It is more than an indication of how India's National AIDS Control Programme (NACO) has been able to manage active prevention measures, while spreading awareness about the same. The Government's decision to continue with NACO, as a Central sector scheme, will certainly help to mobilise funds for carrying out sustained efforts in far-flung areas like the North-East, where HIV-infected patients are comparatively higher than in the rest of India. Besides, an attempt to cover young people in the country by linking the national AIDS initiatives and the Rashtriya Kishor Swasthya Karyakram, would be more than a much-needed step in the direction towards controlling the disease. However, the Government must take all precautionary policies to check the disease in some low prevalence States like Odisha, Jharkhand and Punjab. Recent steps by the Health Ministry to launch a NACO mobile application, which includes a risk calculator, service directory addressing the existing myths and misconceptions about the disease, a link for a national toll-free AIDS helpline, and finally, a social protection scheme, should provide a big boost to India achieving the AIDS-free mark after a decade and half.
Today, it is widely believed that AIDS is not an incurable disease. But what we need is timely awareness accompanied by availability of adequate medicines. A global consensus has already developed that, most countries have the necessary tools to end the AIDS epidemic. India is not far behind, though it recorded an estimated 89,000 of the world's 2.1 million people newly affected by HIV in 2015. For a country like India, fighting AIDS requires essential medicines at affordable price. Here, the Government has a crucial role to play and ensure that medicines needed to prevent HIV infection is supplied to the most affected zones first. And also, the Government needs to review a good number of public health facilities where the treatment of HIV-AIDS can be conducted safely. Over the past one decade, the country has made considerable progress in preventing HIV-AIDS in the country, in comparison to other nations in the region. HIV infections have fallen by more than half since 2001. While this figure is encouraging, any laxity in continuity with the anti-HIV/AIDS programmes can be disastrous.