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Tackling AIDS: A National priority

While our fellows have been instructed to live on a diet of abstinence, and keep their libido in check, they have oscillated between exultation and frustration. Exultation for being awarded a special medal for their celibate lifestyle and frustration on seeing army men of other countries reveling in carnal pleasures, the AIDS scare notwithstanding. While AIDS continues to remain the scourge of our times with no cure or vaccine in sight yet, more and more individuals the world over continue to fall prey to it, sometimes for no fault of theirs. It is of course an established fact that the HIV virus could be transmitted through body fluids like blood and semen. So, even an innocuous blood transfusion could turn out to be quite fatal, if the blood transfused into your body has not been properly screened for HIV, and poor you happen to be the unlucky one to receive it. Health care in our country has always left much to be desired. Government hospitals are the pits when it comes to maintaining even the basic standards of hygiene.

Patients are often treated like guinea pigs meant for experimentation or sub-human specimens in a laboratory. So many people donate blood at these hospitals without proper screening. Most of them do it for money, particularly the desperately poor. Many of them are addicted to alcohol or narcotic substances and donate blood for money that would buy them their daily fix or swig, as the case may be.

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Tackling AIDS: A National priority

Leave alone government hospitals, sometimes even private clinics are guilty of negligence. Cases of bottles of saline or glucose have been reported to have contained fungus or some other foreign matter. And what about blood? How reliable is the infrastructure we have in place? Are those who man these centers efficient and vigilant enough? These are hard questions with no easy answers. However, for many who have, at some time or the other, to depend on them, it could well be a matter of life and death. Hence, it would not be overstating the point that the authorities cannot possibly take it lying down. While a handful of soldiers may be goaded to abstain from sex in a faraway African nation, making use of handy tools like religion, among other things, what about the teeming millions in our own country? Not that any of our soldiers doing duty overseas is expendable at all, but the question remains, what about their countless, hapless, hopeless countrymen back in Bharat mahan?

So many sex workers don't even know the disease exists. Most of them "service" several clients in a single day. Recently, one TV channel showed a beaming sex worker declaring boastfully of having had sex with more than 200 clients in a single day! She did it ostensibly to have her name entered in the record books. Wonder how many of her clients were HIV positive. Wonder how many of them were married men who weren't infected to begin with, but who went back home to their wives with the virus in their blood stream. In our country where talking about sex still largely remains taboo and it is all gupt gyan, meant to be kept under wraps, awareness levels remain abysmally low. City dwellers know vaguely that the disease exists, but how many of them know how fatal it really is and how it could be transmitted. Sex workers when interviewed have revealed more than once that they can never possibly coerce their clients to use condoms. After all, they say, their daily bread depends on their trade however lowly it might be, and they cannot afford to be too fastidious.

So, even as research for the evasive cure for the dreaded disease continues, and until such time that we have a viable, clinically proven vaccine that is readily available to the common man even in Third World countries, prevention is the best way to combat the menace. A massive awareness drive is called for to educate and enlighten our multitudes about the disease and all its repercussions. Even our adolescents need to be informed about AIDS, safe sex etc. They are our future citizens. Teams of volunteers need to penetrate our villages and tell people living there in as simple a manner as would be possible about the deadly disease. Slums in cities are also often the breeding ground for diseases of all types for more than one reason. They need to be targeted too. Those who have already been infected need to be taught how they could prevent its spread and contribute towards preventing it from assuming epidemic proportions. Unless these and many more such measure are adopting without wasting any more precious time we are surely headed for disaster!

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