HIV/AIDS is out of control in India

BBC News:

A senior Aids expert has warned that HIV in India is "out of control".

The executive director of the Global Fund to Fight Aids said that the epidemic in India is spreading rapidly and nothing is being done to stop it.

Richard Feachem warned that India has overtaken South Africa as the country with the most HIV positive patients.

He warned that the epidemic has spread so quickly that India needed to "wake up" and take the problem seriously, otherwise millions of people will die.

"The epidemic (in India) is growing very rapidly. It is out of control. There is nothing happening in India today that is big or serious enough to prevent it," Mr Feachem said.

He warned that India has now overtaken South Africa as the country with the highest number of people living with Aids or the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV.

"Official statistics show India in second place and South Africa in first place," he said, "but the official statistics are wrong. India is in first place," he told the AFP news agency.

Latest figures provided by the UN agency UNAids - released in July 2004 - show that South Africa had the highest total of people with HIV or Aids in the world, with an estimated 5.3 million infected adults and children in a range of 4.5 to 6.2 million.

India's total was put at 5.1 million, but the range estimate was far wider - from 2.5 to 8.5 million - because of the lack of reliable data there in relation to the HIV pandemic.

Mr Feachem warned that the illness would spread faster among India's Hindu population than among Muslims, because Muslims tend to be circumcised, which he said was "an acknowledged protective factor" against the Aids virus.

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