In what experts call the “best news on AIDS for India,” an Indo-Canadian team of scientists has come up with the first definitive evidence that the AIDS epidemic is slowing down in at least southern India, considered the the cradle of the disease in the country. This essentially means that the prevention program seems to be making headway and gloom-and-doom scenarios of AIDS in India need to be put into perspective.

The study, in the latest issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, reports a one-third decline in new HIV infections in the worst-hit regions of India: Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh.

While data from north India is still cause for worry, the Lancet study reports that prevalence of HIV-1 (the most common variant of the virus in India) prevalence fell in the southern states from 1.7% to 1.1%—a relative reduction of 35%.

UNAIDS, World Health Organisation and the Government of India all agree on an estimated 5.1 million people infected with HIV, 75% of them in the southern states.

The Lancet study’s 10-member team of researchers studied a sample of over 2.9 lakh women and 58,000 men attending 132 sexually transmitted infection (STI) clinics in the north and south from 2000 to 2004.

“This is the best news so far on AIDS in India,” Nirmal Kumar Ganguly, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research, told The Indian Express tonight, adding that intervention strategies based on increasing awareness and imparting adequate information especially among high-risk groups might have helped put a brake on the epidemic.

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