Seven-year-old Pintu Jana (name changed), a thalassaemia and HIV-positive patient, is untraceable. Needing regular blood transfusions and medication, the resident of Jhargram cannot be located either by the state Health Department or NGOs who have been assigned by the Government.

However, Jana’s is not a solitary case. As security forces and Maoists lock horns in trouble-torn Lalgarh and adjoining areas, more than 60 HIV-positive people, part of the programme of the National AIDS Control Society, many of them critical and undergoing anti-retroviral therapy (ART), cannot be reached by health workers.

“We cannot trace a single patient in the Jhargram-Lalgarh area. As part of the national HIV/AIDS programme, we not only provide medication, counselling and care but each patient is checked on a regular basis and we have to keep track of them. For the past seven days, none of the critical patients can be contacted,” says Ranjan Sourav Das, project coordinator of the community care centre.

In collaboration with the Government, the centre sends health workers to each of the HIV patients’ house. Now that has stopped.

“Many of them are critical and on ART. They cannot be traced and no one can reach them. I am more concerned as there is a food shortage and HIV-positive people cannot cope with that,” says Dr Anindya Sen, in-charge of the NACO ART Centre at Midnapore Medical College Hospital.

According to records, seven-year-old Jana, son of a shopkeeper in one of the remote villages of Jhargram, has been suffering from thalassaemia since his birth. During routine blood transfusions, he also caught HIV. Referred to the community care centre for treatment, he underwent transfusion and got treated for infections related with HIV before leaving for home last month.

... contd.