Friday, May 09, 2003
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Tamil Nadu
By Our Staff Reporter
Releasing the 7th wave of Behaviour Surveillance Survey of AIDS Prevention and Control Project (APAC) and referring to the round II BSS of TN State AIDS Control Society (TNSACS) in rural areas, she said the mother to child transmission project had been extended to 56 more hospitals, as ANC was a major indicator of the prevalence of HIV/AIDS. The success lessons that the data threw up in small pockets should be internalised, improving intervention programmes among migrant workers, particularly in factory towns, and taking the treatment for reproductive tract infections to the women. K. Deenabandhu, Project Director, TNSACS, said the survey done in rural areas showed that the awareness about AIDS in urban areas was nearly 98 per cent, while in rural areas it was 84 per cent. APAC's intervention methods had promoted the need for protected sex, and more men used condoms in the State. The percentage of voluntary blood donors was now 63 per cent, while sero positivity was down to 0.23 per cent. Over 9,000 high schools and higher secondary schools will have AIDS education programme as part of the curriculum, while intervention efforts were needed in Tirunelveli district, where increasingly the migrant workers returning from Mumbai contacted the disease. Giving thrust to the care and support area, six more community care centres would be added to the existing four, Mr. Deenabandhu said. Three private hospitals were currently treating AIDS patients for free and efforts were on to ensure support from more private institutions. In collaboration with Family Health International, a comprehensive district plan had been started in Namakkal district where the ANC positivity was 4 per cent in 2002, a fall of 0.25 per cent from 2001. A social security trust for HIV/AIDS patients has been planned in which a corpus would be set up and a patient would receive Rs. 200 a year. In case of death, a family would get Rs. 5,000. The BSS among truckers and helpers (TH), commercial sex workers (CSW) and the high-risk population in rural and urban areas in the State was carried out between October and December 2002 by SRI-IMRB. Funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), 16 indicators were used to explain the trends. Face-to-face interviews with 5, 860 people in 13 towns included CSWs, young men in the slums, injecting drug users (IDU), men and women factory workers and gays. A mystery client survey was also carried out among the CSWs. There was a 30 per cent rise in condom use with regular clients while with live-in partners it was only 23.3 per cent. There was a 20 per cent fall in the number of TH who reported non-regular sex since 1999. Reported casual sex had fallen by half to 8.5 per cent. There was no change in the number of young men in slums or the male factory workers who indulged in casual or paid sex. Of the targeted IDUs, 94 per cent could afford sterile needles but half of them frequently shared drug from common solution, and 65.6 per cent shared their needles and syringes.
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