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Facing the Challenge

Dr. Anil Awachat: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
Its dawn, I hear only the clock ticking, everyone is fast asleep in the house, and I am writing this article on AIDS. Somewhere around a year or two I started gathering information about this subject. Earlier I also used to sleep peacefully, but when I met the specialists in this area and the people affected, not only did I lose sleep but this issue bothers me even when I am awake.

We are heading towards a disaster, as this disease is spreading rapidly. So the educated and aware people have to rise to face this challenge and not wait for the reformists or social workers to do something about it. For that we need to understand this subject, and to understand this subject we need not go to a microbiologist or a immunologist. We all have the capacity to understand and we have the right to understand. When the first case of AIDS was reported in the US in 1981, India gave the matter a let go, saying that such incidences occur in the US only as we do not have homosexual or pre/extra marital relationships here. When the first AIDS case in India was reported in Chennai, we ignored it as something that happens once in a blue moon. We need not worry about such matters. When AIDS awareness programs were aired on television, they had to be closed due to opposition saying such programs create unnecessary fear among the masses.

India is one of the worst affected countries today. And sometimes also known as World capital of AIDS. This is a great financial burden for a country like India, which is already loaded with problems of poverty, economic instability and a haphazard medical system and a corrupt bureaucracy. The AIDS challenge has been overlooked by the heads of the state. India has ignored the warning given by experts at the Vancouver Conference that India will have maximum AIDS patients by the year 2005, but India has already proven this ten years earlier. Before understanding the subject of AIDS we need to understand immunity first, I passed out MBBS in 1967 and compared to that the research in this field has increased a lot. I felt like a new comer in this field, so I started tutorials with specialists at the National AIDS Research Institute at Bhosari Pune. There I met this fair bespectacled gentleman Dr. Arun Paranjpe. He taught me how the immune system works. He showed me a diagram of various cells moving towards each other. He explained me this cell stimulates this cell, this cell inhibits this cell I was unable to understand the whole puzzle, but Dr. told me there is further more complicated network of immunity in the body. But how do these cells signal each other? I asked How do they come to know? Do they think? My curiosity was increasing, Dr Paranjpe told me experiments have proven that this is regulated by chemicals. Millions of anti bodies circulate in the body to combat the lacs of germs entering our body. There is an ongoing fight in the body between the germs and antibodies which protect us from falling sick.

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