SHILLONG, India, April 22 (AFP) - Indian defence authorities sounded a health alert Friday with scores of soldiers engaged in anti-insurgency operations in the country's troubled northeast struck by HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
"The time has come to wake up with HIV infection among our troops assuming serious dimensions. Now we find more soldiers dying to HIV-AIDS than to bullets fired by militants," Lieutenant General Bhopinder Singh, Director General of Assam Rifles, said in Meghalaya state capital Shillong.
"We have a challenge at hand and we need to tackle it sensitively," he told AFP at the force headquarters.
The Assam Rifles is a premier paramilitary force of 55,000 troops deployed in the rugged jungles of the northeast against some 30 guerrilla groups waging insurgencies for independent homelands or greater autonomy.
The first HIV-positive Assam Rifles soldier was detected in 1992.
Since then, 32 Assam Rifles soldiers have died of AIDS and 180 more are in serious condition at two treatment camps in the region.
After random blood screening, Assam Rifles doctors sounded the alert saying the number of soldiers infected with HIV was alarming.
Doctors with army and other paramilitary and police units in the northeast also say they are concerned but have not carried out the random blood screening that has revealed the extent of the spread of HIV among the Assam Rifles.
While the percentage of soldiers suffering from HIV-AIDS is in line with the less than half a percent of India's total population, experts say soldiers deployed in the region are still ignorant about how the illness spreads.
"We find awareness levels about how HIV spreads very low among soldiers," said S.I. Ahmed, an AIDS specialist from Assam's main city of Guwahati.
The Assam Rifles held a day-long HIV-AIDS awareness campaign Friday in Shillong with a host of celebrities, including actor Shilpa Shetty and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Farooq Abdullah, taking part.
As part of the drive, Assam Rifles soldiers were being given free condoms.
One paramilitary soldier, who asked not to be named, said he was devastated when doctors told him last weekend that he had tested HIV-positive.
"I was traumatized," he said.
Promiscuity explains the spread of HIV.
"We're invariably stressed out and monotony sets in working in isolated and hostile terrain for a long period," the soldier said. "So the easy way to relax is to go for casual sex. And I also did that without really knowing the consequences."
"In most cases we have found the soldiers mingling with the locals and then going for unprotected sex to fight stress and fatigue," one Assam Rifles doctor said. "Life away from families for a longer duration is one of the reasons."
The New Delhi government on Wednesday strongly disputed claims by an international anti-AIDS group that India has outstripped South Africa as the country with the highest tally of people living with HIV-AIDS.
Officially South Africa has 5.3 million infected people and India 5.1 million.
However, the executive director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, Richard Feachem, said the official statistics were wrong and India had overtaken South Africa.
India's northeast has been declared as one of the country's high-risk zones with close to 100,000 people infected with HIV.
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