New HIV infections in India almost triple in 2005

April 25, 2006

New HIV infections in India almost triple in 2005: report

Monday April 24, 07:46 PM

NEW DELHI (AFP) - New HIV infections in India almost tripled in 2005

from the previous year, but were far below the half a million new

cases seen in 2003, a government report said.

The report, which drew on samples from government hospitals

nationwide, said " 5.206 million adult people are HIV infected, "

India's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) said.

The latest data shows that India has 72,000 new HIV cases,

increasing the overall number infected by 1.4 percent.

In 2004, the country reported only 28,000 new cases, which was much

lower than the 520,000 new infections reported in 2003.

The number of Indians infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS,

is second only to South Africa where as many as 6 million people are

infected.

However, the rate of infection in the nation of 1.1 billion people

is 0.91 percent, well below South Africa and other sub-Saharan

countries as India focuses on high-risk population to control the

spread, NACO said

But K. Sujatha Rao, the chief of NACO, told Press Trust of India

news agency, that although India could track infections better and

was spending more money on prevention, the government did not know

how many people were dying of AIDS.

The Indian Council of Medical Research is conducting a study to

estimate the number of death linked to HIV and results are expected

in two months, Rao said. However, the study may have gaps because 90

percent of the infected people do not know that they carried the

virus, Rao said.

A study by the British medical journal The Lancet last month

suggested a sharp slowdown in the rate of new infections in India's

high-prevalence southern states.

Six Indian states -- Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and

Karnataka in the south and Manipur and Nagaland in the northeast --

account for almost two thirds of HIV infections.

Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund to Fight

AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, said in a recent report that rates

of infection may be higher than official statistics in poor northern

states and that India had outstripped South Africa as the country

with the highest tally of people infected.

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