WORLD AIDS DAY HIV-positive patients getting free life-saving drugs double since ’08

More People Want To Get Treated: Docs Mumbai: The happy news on the HIV epidemic front continues. Just when United Nations AIDS (UNAIDS) has praised India for reducing  new HIV infection rate by 57% in a decade, news from Mumbai shows that the number of patients put on life-saving drugs has almost doubled in the last five years. Figures released by the Mumbai District AIDS Control Society (MDACS) on the eve of World AIDS Day show that 36,920 HIV patients in the city have been put on anti-retroviral therapy (ART) over the years.      The therapy has been instrumental in changing the perception of AIDS from being a death sentence to a manageable chronic disease. "This is a 96.2% increase in the number of patients taking ART since 2008," said Dr B Adsul, additional project director at MDACS. The numbers show that the AIDS-control programme is spreading wider into the community. The city's government-aided AIDS control programme has registrations of 67,326 patients across the city.      "In the last five years, we have managed to increase the number of patients coming to us for treatment by 60%,'' added Dr Adsul. That HIVpositive individuals are living healthier lives can be gauged from the fact almost 40% of the registered patients don't need ART yet, said an MDACS official.      The MDACS, which works under the civic body, operates 69 centres for testing and counselling patients as well as 10 centres to distribute ART medicines.      In the last five years, the number of people getting themselves checked for the disease has gone up by 39%. The number of pregnant women getting themselves checked for HIV has increased by 5%. India among 12 nations with most HIV+ adolescents: UN Global AIDS Deaths In 10-19 Age Group Up 50%  New Delhi: A new report puts India among 12 highburden countries like South Africa, Nigeria and Tanzania that are home to the 2.1 million adolescents living with HIV in 2012.      A UNICEF report says that AIDS-related deaths amongst adolescents between the ages of 10 and 19 increased by 50% between 2005 and 2012, rising from 71,000 to 110,000 and that many adolescents were unaware that they were infected.      The 2013 Stocktaking Report on Children and AIDS—released on the occasion of World AIDS Day on Sunday— says that an estimated 74% of the 2.1 million adolescents live in 12 high burden countries. It says that investments to the tune of $5.5 billion by next year will be required to avoid an added two million adolescents, particularly girls, getting infected by 2020. Investments in 2010 were US$3.8 billion.      "If high-impact interventions are scaled up using an integrated approach, we can halve the number of new infections among adolescents by 2020," said UNICEF executive eirector Anthony Lake. "It's a matter of reaching the most vulnerable adolescents with effective programmes – urgently."      The report also found that girls are more vulnerable among adolescents. Of the total of 2.1 million individuals, 1.2 million are females. The total infected adolescent population in South Asia is 130,000 with 51% men and 49% women.