“Wasim Pasha ko AIDS hoga kya? (Will Wasim Pasha get AIDS?).” "Chhoone se AIDS nahi hota. (Touching does not transmit AIDS.)” Can you recall how these AIDS-awareness campaigns became ingrained in the public conscience in the late 1990s to early 2000s through Doordarshan? Long before condom ads in India became mainstream, several actors—Shabana Azmi, Om Puri, Adil Hussain, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui—lent their faces to these government crusades. All this effort was to slow the burgeoning AIDS epidemic in the country. But as Doordarshan faded from the public memory with the advent of cable and satellite TV, NACO—the body behind most of these drives—was also relegated to the annals of history. That was until July this year when a group of HIV+ people started a sit-in at NACO’s headquarters in Delhi. Their complaint? A shortage of life-saving drugs across centres. But how did we come to this? Remember, India has vowed to eliminate HIV by 2030. Official reports (in 2021) estimate that around 2.5 million people in the country are infected with HIV, of which 600,000 people don’t know about their positive status. Besides, the country is adding 60,000-odd people to the infected list annually. Also, over 40,000 people died due to HIV-related complications last year. While a NACO report says that there has been a drop in the number of new infections in the past 10-12 years, it still has a long way to go to achieve its target of a 90% decline. Now, as the spotlight shifts away from HIV in India, NACO, too, seems to be slipping up. Taking its place on the priority list is another deadly disease: Tuberculosis. After all, there were ~214 million people living with TB in India as of 2021. And this affects not only HIV+ people but also those with twin infections of HIV and TB. The MMS dives deep into the why and what-if of the government program to discover how India’s HIV mission became a sideshow to its TB-control efforts. And how the patients are riddled with co-existing concerns.
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