‘Guard against complacency or face second HIV wave’

In 2009,it was estimated that 2.4 million people are living with HIV and nearly four lakh are on Anti Retroviral Therapy (ART). Access to ART has improved quality of life and increased survival rates. “However,there is a proportion of patients receiving ART but not responding to treatment,posing a challenge to scientists,” said Paranjape.

NARI,as part of its effort to prevent HIV,has submitted a proposal to create a database on Indian HIV-subtype C. There are several HIV patients on whom any kind of treatment has failed and scientists now want to understand this pattern of drug resistance.

“Treatment can be limited due to side effects and drug resistance and hence we have set up a virus bank to study the influence of the changes in the HIV genome,” said Paranjape. NARI has been working for the last couple of years on the genetic make up of the virus. For the setting up of a database,we intend taking samples of patients from ART centres and studying the pattern of drug resistance,Paranjape said.

NARI has already developed an HIV repository,the only one in India with strains collected from different parts of the country and contains different subtypes and recombinants. These strains would be useful for scientists to test anti-virals,candidate vaccine,microbicides as well as conducting basic laboratory research.

Among areas decided as priority ones to intensify strategies for prevention are containing the twin HIV-TB co-infection and research on the human papilloma virus (HPV). Among HIV positive women,HPV infection is of particular concern as it may lead to cervical cancer. The focus will be on early detection.