NEW DELHI, 20 December: India has got a 100 million US dollar (ca. 500 mio. DKR) grant from the Global Fund for AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria to fight the three diseases over the next three years.
India is the Global Funds largest partner is Asia, with grants worth 747 million dollar approved to prevent and threat the three communicable diseases.
– Eighty per cent of the money will be used for HIV/AIDS treatment and setting up more counselling and testing centres, while the rest will be used for anti-tuberculosis drugs and malaria prevention and treatment, said Michel Kazatchkine, who took over as executive director of The Global Fund in April and is on his first visit to India.
There are an estimated 2,5 million people living with HIV in India, with 70.000 of them being children. Under programmes supported by the Global Fund in India, 80.000 people are getting treated for AIDS, 250.000 for TB, 300.000 for malaria, while another 1,5 million were given insecticide-treated mosquito nets to prevent malaria.
– Since it was established in 2002, the Fund has helped prevent 2 million deaths globally, which is 3.000 lives every day, says Kazatchkine.
Indian Health minister Anbumani Ramadoss said more attention need to be paid to infectious diseases such as malaria that still cause disease and death in several hilly and tribal states where health outreach was low.
– The more fatal form of malaria – Plasmodium falciparum – is endemic in the north-eastern states, Orissa, West Bengal and Jharkhand, and its control has been given additional support under Global Fund-supported Intensified Malaria Control Project. In areas where people are resistant to the anti-malaria drug Chloroquine, Artesunate and Sulphadoxinepyremethamine combination therapy has been introduced, said Ramadoss.
Under a Central government programme, India will offer free second-line antiretroviral drugs used to treat AIDS to poor patients from January 1, 2008.
– The free drugs will initially be available to people below the poverty line at Tambaran Hospital in Chennai and J J Hospital in Mumbai but the programme will be upscaled over the next two years to include other centers across the country. The good news is that the price of first-line antiretroviral drugs has dropped from Rs 7.500 Pupees per person per year to 5.000 Rs per person per year, which means we can include far more people in the programme within the same budget, says Sujatha Rao, director general, National AIDS Control Organization.
Second-line or second-generation antiretroviral drugs like Tenofovir, Retanovir or Abacavir. Nearly 2.000 patients are expected to benefit from the free treatment in its first phase.
Kilde: The Push Journal
