India will have to scale up prevention of HIV to avoid having to spend an increasing share of its health budget on treatment of AIDS patients, the World Bank and other agencies said yesterday.
New Delhi spends about 5 percent of its US$5.4 billion health budget on treating AIDS patients.
India with 2.5 million patients is among the top three countries with the highest number of HIV cases, alongside South Africa and Nigeria.
But with HIV cases showing signs of rising in the capital New Delhi, in Mumbai, in the north and the northeast, the cost of treatment in India could rise to US$1.8 billion by 2020, about 7 percent of the total health expenditure, the World Bank says.
This would pose an enormous burden on the health care services and the budget in a country where malaria still kills hundreds of people every year and other health-sector challenges like non-communicable diseases are as sharp as AIDS, experts say.
More than 15 percent of the 200,000 plus injectible drug users (IDU) are HIV positive in the country against a global average of 10 percent, AIDS experts say.
In some areas, HIV positive cases among IDUs have been found to be as high as 50 percent, health ministry officials quoting an ongoing survey said.
This rise could fuel the spread of AIDS unless checked, aid agencies say in their reports.
“What we are worried about, are the concentrated epidemics in the country, among vulnerable groups in districts,” said Mariam Claeson, World Bank Program Coordinator (HIV/AIDS).
“Those concentrated epidemics can act as wildfires and therefore need to be targeted with effective prevention efforts,” said Claeson, an expert on AIDS in South Asia.
The World Bank says the poor risk getting poorer in India as AIDS patients get marginalized and face income loss because of their HIV status.
The World Bank quoting a recent study says in its report that about 36 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS in India reported an income loss and increased expenditure on treatment.
“HIV is not a major threat to the current economic growth of India, but the welfare impact is significant and HIV disproportionately affects the poor,” Claeson said.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion