Despite lack of adequate facilities for HIV testing and anti-retroviral treatment in Jammu and Kashmir, a major portion of funds earmarked for tackling HIV-AIDS has gone unspent for three successive years.
Despite lack of adequate facilities for HIV testing and anti-retroviral treatment in Jammu and Kashmir, a major portion of funds earmarked for tackling HIV-AIDS has gone unspent for three successive years.
Given the status of spendings this year, it is unlikely that the State Aids Control Society (SACS) would be able to spend the entire amount of Rs4.50 crore allocated to it for the current financial year.
"We have spent Rs1.80 crore on awareness programmes and other activities including the treatment of the affected persons till the end of November this year," Dr Waseem Qureshi, director of the SACS, said.
Although the SACS staff in the state draw a cumulative salary of Rs2.50 crore per annum, the spendings on their actual task has been dismal.
This is for the fourth consecutive year that the society is likely to under-spend the allotted funds for combating AIDS in the state.
An amount of Rs2.58 crore sanctioned for the SACS remained unspent during the last fiscal while the figures for 2007-08 and 2008-09 were Rs2.90 Crore each.
State health minister Sham Lal Sharma, addressing a seminar on World AIDS Day, said 234 new cases have been detected in the state over the past 12 months alone.
He also admitted that 185 people have died over the past decade in the state due to AIDS.
"The situation is not so alarming in Jammu and Kashmir but we have to be cautious in future and gear up our efforts," Sharma said.
According to the official data, there are 658 patients who have been put on anti-retroviral treatment at the two centres run by the society in Jammu and Srinagar cities.
There are no facilities in any other town of the state for the people afflicted by the virus and many government-run hospitals are not even equipped with the HIV testing kits.
However, Qureshi said every unit of blood given as transfusion at major hospitals is screened before being used to check the spread of virus.
"We are moving towards achieving the target of having all the blood banks equipped with screening kits," he added.
He said Jammu and Kashmir was a low prevalence state as only 0.01% of the population was affected which was very low compared to the national average of 0.31%.
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