Armed Forces expand HIV surveillance

Now,HIV-infected wives to get cocktail of drugs from sixth month of pregnancy....

The Indian Armed Forces policy on HIV prevention has been revised to incorporate a salient feature. Henceforth,HIV-infected pregnant wives of Armed Forces personnel will be given a cocktail of drugs from the sixth month of pregnancy to prevent the transmission of the virus to the infant.

This is for the first time in the country that such a move has been proposed to curb HIV transmission. However,recruits will continue not to be screened for the virus while joining the forces.

The AIDS control programme of the Armed Forces has been a success story with the present prevalence rate being just 0.1 per cent. In fact,it is the AIDS Control Organisation in the department of community medicine at Armed Forces Medical College that has been guiding the AIDS control programme in the armed forces.

The revised policy,however,prefers to adopt a high index of suspicion towards the incidence of the virus as the prevalence rates are higher among personnel of BSF,CRPF and DSC than the Army.

Major General Mandeep Singh,Additional Director General,Armed Forces Medical Services medical research,who has been on the forefront of the AIDS control programme in the forces,told The Indian Express,As part of expansion of our HIV surveillance programme,the policy is to give a cocktail of anti-HIV drugs to the pregnant woman from the sixth month, he said. The present policy is to give the drug nevaripine to pregnant woman while she is delivering the baby.

Armed forces are a vulnerable high-risk group because of their youthful profile and separation from families. There has been a steady decline since 2003,when AIDS was the cause of 170 personnel being declared invalid every year,to merely 15 now. An increased surveillance programme had led to an exponential increase in the number of cases detected then. The detection rates peaked in 2000 and then began to plateau out,he said.