Hyderabad, August 09: Union Minister for Urban Development S. Jaipal Reddy has said what was worrying in the fight against HIV/AIDS was the lack of reliable estimate about the prevalence of the deadly disease.
Inaugurating a national conference on HIV here on Saturday, Mr. Reddy felt the administrators were not attaching as much importance as they should have in checking the spread of the disease. He asked them to draw up strategies to create social awareness so that the stigma and ostracisation associated with the problem was contained.
Medical problem
Mr. Reddy refuted that HIV/AIDS had anything to do with moral values and said basically it was a medical problem. He asked concerned people not to indulge in moral sermons to check the menace.
They should promote safe sex practices and counsel public against indiscriminate or pre-marital sexual relations, particularly among youth.
Film actor Amala Akkineni recalled an instance in Chhattisgarh where a doctor fixed a band superscribed with the word AIDS on a patient’s forehead to drive home the point that the stigma attached to the disease continued in various forms. She emphasised that the disease could be controlled only when the stigma went.
The Dean of Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS) M.U.R. Naidu said HIV/AIDS was the fourth leading cause of death globally. The head of general medicine department of the hospital V.R. Srinivasan described the disease as the plague of modern times.
–Agencies–