News Section | Indian Health
Gates scheme helped India avert 100000 HIV infections
A scheme funded by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation may have helped India slow the spread of HIV by about 100,000 cases in the past five years, a new study has suggested.
The Avahan project was launched in 2003 in six states, which had the highest rate of HIV in India at the time.
The aim was to invest in HIV prevention by targeting high-risk groups such as sex workers and truck drivers.
The Lancet study said it showed such an investment can reduce HIV prevalence.
“The results of our analysis suggest that Avahan had a beneficial effect in reducing HIV prevalence at the population level over five years of programme implementation in some of the states,” the assessment said.
It said that the findings supported investment in well-managed HIV prevention programmes in low and middle-income countries.
The 258m-dollar (164m pounds) Avahan project was based in the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Manipur and Nagaland.
It targeted high-risk groups such as sex workers, injecting drug users and truck drivers with tactics such as safe-sex counselling, free condoms, exchanging used needles for sterilised ones and through campaigning and advocacy.
It found that the campaign was most effective in the districts that got the most resources but it also had a greater impact in the highly-populated southern Indian states.
Indian authorities say the number of annual new HIV infections has declined by more than 50 percent during the past decade.
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