While per capita HIV infection rates in India will likely never reach the levels found in South Africa, India is well on its way to surpassing South Africa’s tally of total AIDS cases.
Currently, the infection rate in India is estimated at only 0.7 percent. But with a population topping a billion people, that translates to 3.8 million adult cases in India compared to South Africa’s 4.7 million cases.
Even with the relatively low infection rate, this is an enormous number of cases that will strain the ability of India’s health care system to respond.
As in Africa, a mixture of denial and lack of openness about the disease has helped it spread. In some areas, such as the western state of Maharashta, as much as 2 percent of the adult population is HIV positive. That may not compare to South Africa’s 20 percent infection rate, but is high compared to a country such as the United States where HIV prevalence is only 0.61 percent (and where the prevalence is due in part to the long survival times of HIV positive individuals thanks to expensive drug regimens).
Source:
Indian HIV ‘could pass South Africa’. The BBC, May 2, 2002.