HEALTH-INDIA: HIV Scare Can Be More Deadly Than Virus Itself

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Jun 4 2001 (IPS) - Medical tests conducted last year proved conclusively that Kaushalya, 29, did not have HIV. But by then the virus had destroyed her social life and forced her to abort her child.

Tragedy struck Kaushalya three years ago when her husband, Ranbir Singh, who drove buses for the nationalised Delhi Transport Corp went down with pulmonary tuberculosis.

Refused treatment at the prestigious state-run Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences at Rohtak by doctors who suspected he had HIV, Singh went home to his village of Chochi, 80 kms west of the national capital, in the neighbouring state of Haryana.

Untreated, Singh’s condition rapidly deteriorated and he died leaving behind the legacy of a virus which has proven to be more socially deadly than anything else for Kaushalya and her family — and indeed for the entire village of Chochi.

Though it was never medically proven that Singh had, in fact, contracted HIV, government doctors advised Kaushalya to abort the foetus of the six-month-old boy she was carrying.

“They destroyed my boy. They destroyed my life, They destroyed everything and now they tell me that I do not have HIV,” said Kaushalya sitting in her small three-room brick house in Chochi which urchins readily point out as the “HIV/AIDS house”.

That despite the fact that it has been proven that nobody in Kaushalya’s family had HIV. For that matter nobody in Chochi have tested positive for the virus in tests they were encouraged to take by the administration.

The tests, and reports of the tests in the media, only served to worsen the social reputation of the community. Chochi’s proximity to the national capital did not help.

Hordes of newspaper reporters from the big national dailies, fed with half-baked ideas on HIV/AIDS, descended on Kaushalya’s home and sensationalised the case without bothering to authenticate the facts.

Before long the little dusty hamlet was being described as “India’s first HIV/AIDS village,” in headlines of stories which hinted darkly of quacks that did not care to sterilise hypodermic needles and barbers who used old-fashioned cut-throat razors.

Such was the scare created by sensational reporting that even today no one from the surrounding villages of Haryana dares to enter into a matrimonial alliance with any resident of Chochi.

“Men from from our village are regularly passed over for jobs and even buses that ply the highway do not stop for us,” said Asad Singh, headman of the village.

Kaushalya’s only hope of rehabilitation and indeed that of Chochi village lies in a claim for compensation filed on their behalf in the High Court of Punjab and Haryana by the Joint Action Council (JAC), a well-known human rights organisation.

“What we are asking for is not money but an acknowledgement from the government that it made a mistake that has shamed us and cost us our reputations,” Kaushalya said.

“The manner in which the civil administration and the medical authorities failed to perform their professional and ethical duties proves that they are ill-equipped to handle situations like the one at Chochi,” said Purushothaman Mulloli, convenor of the JAC.

“Even if Ranbir actually died of HIV/AIDS, basic, internationally accepted guidlelines concerning confidentiality were violated with the result that the entire village was branded AIDS-affected and the residents socially ostracised,” he said.

More than 40 of the villagers have signed separate affidavits claiming how they have been discriminated against or have suffered only because of their association with Chochi and its undeserved reputation.

Well-known activists such as Siddharth Dube, author of a book entitled ‘Sex, Lies and AIDS’ have accused the government and various U.N. agencies of concentrating on putting out dire statistics on the spread of the infection without doing much to contain it.

According to Dube, going by the estimates and projections put out by the government and the by the UN agencies, 15 million people could be affected by the disease in India by the year 2005.

But Prasada Rao, director of the central government’s well- funded National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) says there was no need to get carried away by statistics. “India has a total commitment to prevention and care where HIV/AIDS is concerned,” he said.