GUWAHATI, India, Dec 1, 2006 (AFP) - Thousands of people in India's northeast which is in the grips of a worsening HIV-AIDs epidemic marched Friday calling for action to stop the spread of the deadly virus.
Schoolchildren, health workers, recovered drug addicts and HIV-positive people wearing red ribbons staged parades through the streets of the main cities in the seven northeastern states -- Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura -- to mark World AIDS Day.
"Don't turn your back on AIDS," cried the marchers in Guwahati, the main city of Assam, the northeast's most populous state.
"Let us take a pledge to jointly stop the AIDS time-bomb from exploding," Assam Health Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma said in Guwahati.
India has the world's heaviest HIV-AIDS caseload with 5.7 million people living with the illness.
The northeast, home to some 40 million people, has been declared as one of the country's high-risk zones with nearly 100,000 people infected with the virus.
As part of the anti-AIDS campaign, the Assam minister launched a counselling and testing camp.
"We need many such voluntary counselling and testing centres to effectively tackle the problem besides easy availability of anti-retroviral therapies (ART)," Jahnabi Goswami, head of the Assam Network of Positive People, said.
Goswami, 30, is one of the few women in India, known for its conservatism on such issues, to have publicly declared that she is HIV-positive.
Authorities in the northeast fear the disease may spread further because of the region's acute drug problem.
India's northeast lies on the edge of the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand and estimates have put the number of intravenous drug users in the region at up to 300,000 -- a key cause of HIV infection here.
HIV transmission rates from mother to child are also assuming frightening proportions, experts say.
"The trend is very serious here in the northeast with intravenous drug users passing the infection to the general population through their sex partners," a Manipur state health department spokesman said.
Manipur is the northeastern state worst hit by HIV/AIDS with more than 25,000 living with the virus.
A large number of people living with HIV in the northeast are struggling for survival with hundreds dying with no access to treatment.
"People are dying regularly and suffering a lot, unable to access ART as such medicines are very expensive," said Dipak Singh, president of the Manipur Network of Positive People.
"Hundreds of such people have died with no access to treatment," Singh said.
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