NACO concerned as AIDS spreads among drug users of Delhi, Mumbai

New Delhi, Apr 19 (UNI) Even though the efforts to contain HIV/AIDS epidemic are paying dividends, the spread of disease among injectible drug users in metro cities and Punjab is emerging as a major cause of concern for the country.

The recent HIV/AIDS surveillance data has revealed the disease, which was earlier confined to IDU users of the North Eastern region, has been found prevalent among drug users of Delhi, Mumbai and Punjab, according to National AIDS Control Organisation Director General Sujatha Rao.

''Earlier, HIV among Injectible Drug Users was confined to just Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram. But now it has spread among IDU of Delhi, Punjab and Mumbai which makes it a bigger problem,'' Ms Rao said and added that providing ART to these drug users was a major issue now.

Globally, it has been found that Injectible drug users along with children were not getting equitable share in ART, a WHO report on HIV/AIDS has revealed.

Interestingly, the report titled 'Towards Universal Access--Scaling up priority HIV/AIDS interventions in the health sector' has quoted the number of HIV/AIDS infection figure for India between 3.4 million to 9.4 million adults and children in 2005.

Earlier, a lot of controversy had emerged on the various estimates put up by UNAIDS and the figures given by NACO based on sentinel surveillance.

Asked about the Indian position regarding the HIV/AIDS estimates in the report, Ms Rao said, ''This is really shocking. How can they have such a great range from 3.4 million to 9.4 million.'' According to NACO data, the country had 5.2 million people infected with HIV/AIDS last year. Stating that NACO was proud of having a very good HIV/AIDS surveillance system, Ms Rao said that this year the number of surveillance sites have been increased from 464 to 1,164 and all of them are processing a large number of bio-samples. The data has been collected and being processed, she informed and said it would soon be made public.

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