The Hindu Business Line : Need to scale up awareness on free AIDS drugs roll-out

BOTH Renuka and her four-year-old son are HIV-positive, but neither of them is on the free anti-AIDS drugs programme that the Government initiated over 18 months ago.

Renuka cannot afford the mandatory health check-ups required to assess whether she and her son require the AIDS drugs.

Less than 10 per cent of the more than 5.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS in India need AIDS drugs. As we mark yet another World AIDS Day on December 1, healthcare representatives feel that communication and monitoring of the roll-out programme needs to be more aggressive and stringent.

The anti-retroviral therapy (ART) programme or the roll-out of free AIDS drugs to patients in the country was spear-headed by the National Aids Control Organisation (NACO) in April 2004. The target was to cover one lakh people over a staggered period up to 2007.

Till date, there are 40 ART centres in the country and about 15,700 patients avail themselves of free drugs from government hospitals. And if private institutions were also included, about 60,000 HIV/AIDS patients are on AIDS drugs.

But the pace of roll-out needs to be much faster, says a representative with a pharma company that supplies drugs to the ART programme.

Even if one were to go by the Government's projection that only seven per cent of patients living with HIV/AIDS need the drug, that would still mean close to four lakh patients. There is no plan to address this, he said.

According to a leading doctor with a Mumbai hospital that supports the free ART programme, patients are still not aware of the free drugs programme. In some cases where they do avail of the free drugs, many of them do not come back for the follow-up. This could be disastrous, she said, as anti-AIDS drugs require compliance and need to be taken on time, as indicated in the regimen. If the regimen is not adhered to, patients could develop resistance to the drugs, she pointed out.

Recently, paediatric AIDS drugs have also been included in the roll-out programme. And while doctors welcome this, they point out the need for improved dosage forms. The present suspension is not convenient and does not last long enough, the doctor said. Also it is sensitive to temperature, there could be a problem if refrigeration is not possible, she said.

Meanwhile, a NACO representative said that they were looking to scale up the roll-out programme. It was also undertaking internal technical discussions on bringing second-line AIDS drugs into the free programme, he said.

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