Where is it going to stop ?

[Guest guest]

Dear Readers,

Please find another entry for the " Nero fiddles while Rome Burns " file in

India.

http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=96402

This article reached Australia via the Asian Age. Earlier this week I read

about the Police Powers and Public Health in The Lancet 2006 367: 805-806. It is

a condemning statement of ambivalence of Indian officials and the flawed

reasoning behind Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Amendment Bill which is totally

unhelpful and in fact will worsen the health and safety interventions.

NACP III 2006-2011 needs to be scrutinised and all the SACS and the Police

forces need to be in synch with best practice.

At the World Economic Forum held in Davao in the Philippines Indian

officials were quick to point out signs of progress around HIV to which the main

critic from the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS says " How can you call it

progress when every year more people die than go on treatment? And every year

the number gets bigger, and every year we have to spend more money, and every

year more people are infected.

You call that progress? I call it the road to the worst health crisis in

recorded human history. "

" The disparity between India and China couldn't be greater. While China is off

the list of countries in denial India is at the top of the list. "

On the 18th World AIDS Day we saw yet again the number of people who are HIV+ve

increasing and it is the same statistic every year.

It is fine for India's top leaders to hobnob with the elite at Davao and

promote India as a 21st century economic power but AIDS has and continues to

devastate lives and economies in Africa and is well on the way to doing the same

in India.

This week some of the most committed and most effective AIDS activists in India

have asked if there is any opportunity for them to leave the country and go and

work somewhere else, so frustrated have they become with the decline in serious

prevention and treatment controls.

And these workers are right at the coal face in places like Bihar and Calcutta

while the outright disregard of the rights of people in Lucknow by the Police

who flagrantly abuse the Constitutional Rights of Indian Citizens in sudden and

arbitrary arrests by a homophobic

bureaucracy intent on using the laws to give vent to a personal agenda rather

than to serve the 'public good'

This makes observers wince at the thought that India is progressive and even

more so to be wary of attending the next Commonwealth Games in Delhi where the

best interests of the citizens is measured by increasing the penalties for

kissing in public ten fold.

India should be very very alarmed indeed because the country has already crossed

the threshhold of infection rates that makes for exponential growth in the

numbers infected, and in a country that can still statistically produce a live

birth every 2 seconds.

Please let me know when there is an sign of intelligent enlightenment so that

we can move on in ways that achieve progress rather than dismal and often

invisible failure.

Geoffrey

E-mail: <gheaviside@...>