With 5.13 million estimated cases of HIV, India can become another Africa, Union Health Minister Dr Anbumani Ramadoss warned on Tuesday.
"India will be another Africa, if left to itself," Ramadoss said, addressing a gathering to launch a series of mass mobilisation initiatives across the country towards weeding out HIV/AIDS.
Giving the example of Botswana in Africa, he said 37 percent of the country's population was suffering from the fatal virus and called for a need to put sustained efforts in place to fight the epidemic in India.
Goonj, an intensive information, education and communication campaign, started on Saturday, concluded in Chandigarh on Tuesday, marking the culmination of a week-long mass mobilisation initiative.
This is in keeping with the national resolve of eradicating HIV/AIDS in the country organised by National AIDS Control Organisation and the State AIDS Control Societies of Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh.
"We need to have massive awareness campaigns to check the spread of AIDS. Youth are going to be our ambassadors who will propogate the message in rural areas that AIDS if preventable if proper precautions are taken," he said.
Later, in a brief chat with reporters, Ramadoss said a national campaign to spread message to weed out HIV/AIDS had been started.
"After Punjab, Haryana and Chandigarh, we plan to launch awareness campaigns in Delhi on December 1 and then take it to Mumbai, Bangalore and Chennai," he said.
Haryana's Health Minister Kartar Devi said that 40,000 HIV cases had been detected in the state, out of which 550 were cases of AIDS. She further said that so far 24 people had succumbed to the fatal disease.
Devi said that a two-month programme till the end of November had been planned to launch awareness among people against the disease.
Punjab's Health Minister R C Dogra said that the way the virus was spreading its tentacles in our society, there was an urgent need to protect its further spread. Dogra said that in Amritsar and Jalandhar, anti-retroviral treatment would be started for AIDS patients.
"We also plan to involve NGOs in various AIDS awareness and prevention programmes," he said.
NACO's Director General S Y Qureshi said that both Punjab and Haryana were vulnerable to the disease as they had lot of migrant population. "We will have to take steps now as we don't want India to become another Africa," he said.
