HIV/AIDS awareness among gay men neglected

Homosexual men are being neglected by India's health system despite a dramatic increase in the number of HIV infections. It is estimated that more than five million Indians are HIV positive. Sujatha Rao, the director general of India's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), said it was only recently that officials starting considering the issue of men who have sex with men (MSM). "I must confess that this [MSM] was not really seen as such a big problem until a mapping exercise was taken up of all the commercial [sex] groups in 2002-2003 and we found that men having sex with men is a very huge number of people in India. "It is so intertwined with the cultural practices that it is a very different approach all together, so we really need to be addressing strategies on how to access them [MSM] with information," Rao said in a recent speech. In 2005, only 18 out of the 703 sites selected for NACO's annual sentinel survey were used to gather data about homosexuals. And of the 4,303 homosexual men tested at these sites, 376 - nearly nine percent - tested HIV positive. Experts said such a high infection rate was worrying. They were also concerned that a large number of MSM did not identify themselves as homosexual and would therefore also have female partners, further increasing the risk of the infection spreading. The UN Joint Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) has advocated that more information, education and prevention programmes be targeted at MSM. UNAIDS said that where homosexual behaviour was particularly taboo, prevention and care programmes for MSM tended to be seriously neglected. There were very few places that MSM could turn to for information and counselling because Indian law and culture were not open to discussions about sex and sexuality. Homosexual sex is punishable by a 10-year prison term. The Mumbai-based Humsafar Trust is one of the few organisations that offers a safe space for gay and bisexual men. A counselling room, coffee lounge and a gay library and archive are features of the centre used by the dozens of men who drop in each week. Humsafar Trust workers have played a prominent role in improving the knowledge and sex practices of the MSM population in the city and surrounding areas. But Ashok Rao Kavi, the Trust's head, conceded that its biggest challenge had been reaching out to gay men and bisexuals who were married to women.