World Health Organization warns of AIDS threat to India, praises polio

September 6, 2000
Web posted at: 7:37 a.m. HKT (2337 GMT)

NEW DELHI, India (AP) -- With polio and leprosy about to be eradicated in India, the director of the World Health Organization warned Tuesday that the country's next big health battle could be against AIDS, although only 0.35 percent of the population is believed to have the deadly virus.

That percentage translates into 3.5 million people in India, because the country's population is estimated to be 1 billion.

Although India is not seen as a region that has been badly hit by the AIDS epidemic, Gro Harlem Brundtland warned, "millions of people are at risk."

She said that the most imminent risk is that AIDS would spread quickly from pockets where it already exists -- in brothels and among truckers, for example -- into the general population, as it has in other countries.

Brundtland praised the government of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee for "looking upon AIDS as the health threat that it is."

The WHO chief also cautioned against the rising threat from smoking.

"At least one out of two people who start smoking will die from it," said Brundtland. She said 4 million people die every year globally of smoking-related diseases. "That will increase to 10 million in 25 years unless we do something about it."

Brundtland advocated increased tobacco taxes, a worldwide ban on advertising, and the signing of an international anti-smoking convention, to be discussed next month in Geneva.

Indian Health Minister C.P. Thakur said later this year, he would propose to Parliament a ban on smoking in all government offices. Thakur said the Indian government would try to get tobacco farmers to grow other crops.

"There are lobbies and counter-lobbies," he said. "But people are dying because of tobacco."

Brundtland also praised India's achievements in eradicating Guinea-worm disease, in moving toward eliminating leprosy by next year and eradicating polio by 2005.

"I particularly wish to commend the intensified national immunization days where millions of children are immunized," she said.

"Within a year or two we expect to eliminate leprosy as a public health problem," she said.

"We are now very close to eradicating polio. An extra hard final push is needed," Brundtland said. India had only 108 known cases of wild polio virus last year.

Brundtland said, however, that a nation's health system is judged by the general health of its people. In India, as in other Asian countries, she said, women are disadvantaged because they are underfed and undereducated.

She presented to the Indian government a WHO report on women's health in South and Southeast Asia. She said the report showed that Asian boys are better fed than Asian girls.

"In India, 80 percent of the women have anemia or some kind of nutritional deficiency during pregnancy, which creates a burden to the woman and the child," said Brundtland.

India's health minister received the report from Brundtland at a press conference and said the government was working to "protect women before they are born."

"In some places of India there are cases of female infanticide," Thakur said. "We are waging a war." He said the government was concentrating on eliminating baby killing, getting young girls into school, delaying their marriage until after 18, and seeing that they get good food and vitamins during pregnancy.

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