Twenty years after the first case of HIV/AIDS was officially recorded in UP, awareness of the disease remains low in the state.
Make that alarmingly low, for 10 instances of the case have been recorded in Meerut in the last 10 months.
All the 10 patients are children who had come to the Lala Lajpat Rai Memorial Medical College for treatment of various ailments ranging from diarrhoea and tuberculosis to high fever.
“We screened 50 children suffering from chronic anaemia, tuberculosis and long-term fever. This also included some children of AIDS afflicted couples. But while only two children detected with the virus have parents who are known to be afflicted, the status of eight sets of parents was so far undisclosed,” says Dr NP Goel, head of the hospital’s Pediatric Department.
Ten children in 50 children equals 20 percent.
Dr   Misra, former head of the Meerut medical college’s social and preventive medicine, told this correspondent that government claims on public education are clearly hollow.  “There is a huge gap between government propaganda and the ground situation. Behaviours have to be changed and awareness of the disease has to be created at the lowest level, starting at the school. The diagnosis of 10 children is clearly a fluke and would never have been done in the normal course,” said Dr Misra.
Dr Goel admits as much when she says that the hospital has been conducting such tests under a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
“But clearly AIDS monitoring is not something that can be done as an isolated project. It needs to be continuous and linked with larger health and community concerns,” she says. Yet like the health department, the state’s education department is floundering on the subject.
Emily Das, UNICEF consultant with the Secondary Education Department rues that while the single chapter devoted to the topic in textbooks is painted with bold moralistic touches, teachers are hesitant to teach even that.  “Teachers are appalled at the thought of being addressed as ‘AIDS wali madam/sir’ (teacher who teaches AIDS) by students. This sense of shame is the biggest stumbling block to creating awareness”, she points out.
A countrywide survey on the prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the country, conducted by the National Aids Control Society, to be made public later this month, is learnt to have rung alarm bells over the prevalence of the disease in pregnant women in UP and Bihar, two states that account for 248.88 million people.