Rare privilege for Ludhiana doctor

[Guest guest]

Rare privilege for DMCH doctor

Express News Service

Ludhiana, October 24: Dr Gautam Ahluwalia, associate professor,

Department of Medicine, DMCH here was recently invited as a guest

faculty to deliver a lecture on HIV-Tuberculosis (TB) co-infection'

in a Continuing Medical Education (CME) programme organised by

National Institute of Health (NIH)/University of California at Los

Angeles (UCLA), USA, in association with All India Institute of

Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and National AIDS Control Organisation

(NACO) in New Delhi.

Dr J.L. Fahey of UCLA and Dr Jyotsana Sokhey, additional project

director, NACO, were chairpersons of the session. Dr Ahluwalia

remarked that HIV and TB were two very important health problems in

India which would have an impact on the economy of the country in

the long run.

``Many of us at times do not appreciate the perspective of the

problem. We need to realize that TB kills one person every minute

somewhere in India and is the cause of 25% of all avoidable deaths.

Almost one third of our population carries the tuberculosis

bacteria,'' said Dr Ahluwalia

He said for HIV, there were reports which say that India had the

maximum number of people living with HIV/AIDS in the world.

Together, HIV and tuberculosis are an extremely deadly combination.

In fact, tuberculosis is the leading cause of death in HIV patients

and increases the risk of developing active TB by 150 times.

Moreover, tuberculosis in HIV is also a diagnostic dilemma. He

further said that the good news was that tuberculosis was curable if

treated appropriately and Revised National Tuberculosis Control

Programme with Directly Observed Therapy Short Course (DOTS) as the

sheet anchor has made a tremendous impact in the control of the

disease.

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