West Bengal: State ART centres on sick bed;

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State ART centres on sick bed; compound plight of HIV patients

Ravik Bhattacharya

Kolkata, August 22: Come September and thousands of under-medication

HIV-positive patients from West Bengal, Bihar and Orissa will be at

the receiving end as Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) centres

throughout the state, including the School of Tropical Medicine

(STM), Calcutta, the largest centre in the eastern region, is due to

collapse owing to a shortage of doctors and staff.

The STM, which is recognised by WHO and NACO as an ART training

centre, at present is being run with a single doctor who has already

resigned and is scheduled to leave by September. The ART programme

is part of the nationwide NACO and WHO initiative to provide free

medical treatment to critical HIV positive patients.

Interestingly, the newly-inaugurated ART centre at Siliguri, North

Bengal is also under-staffed. Two other ART centres in Burdwan and

Midnapore medical colleges are on the verge being shut down as they

were operating without mandatory NACO permission.

At the School of Tropical Medicine, the senior medical officer had

resigned and left in July. Since then, the onus of running the ART

centre had been on one medical officer, who has already resigned and

is scheduled to leave by September. The centre has no pharmacist

which is mandatory according to medical norms. The STM centre is the

largest in the region catering to nearly more than 1,200 HIV-

positive people. Apart from Kolkata and various other districts,

people from Jharkhand, Bihar and Orissa throng the hospital too for

medication. Every day, around 70 HIV-positive people visit the ART

centre at STM for medication.

The newly-inaugurated ART centre at Siliguri, North Bengal, at

present, has only one doctor and a counsellor.

" The centres at Burdwan and Midnapore needed the mandatory

permission from NACO, which is running the programme throughout the

state. But for some reason the permission was not taken by the West

Bengal State HIV AIDS Prevention and Control Society. Even the state

health secretary was kept in the dark regarding the centres. There

are specific guidelines by NACO that no ART centre should be started

without trained personnel and necessary manpower, " said an official

from the health department. According to the ART programme, critical

HIV-positive people are provided with free drugs to keep the disease

under control. Each patient is given two tablets apart from the

general symptomatic treatments.

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