The National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) will provide the second line drugs, probably free of cost, to the AIDS patients who are unable to get relief from the existing treatment using first line drugs. This effort by the NACO is expected to bring hope to scores of poor AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome) patients.

K Sujatha Rao, director-general, NACO, said, the second line drugs will be available on condition that these expensive drugs will be distributed only after meeting its primary target of providing first line medicines to one lakh AIDS patients in the government-run ART (anti retroviral therapy) centres. The second line drugs are tenoforvir and lopinavir or ritonavir.

The HIV positive patients have been crying coarse for the last some time for free availability of second line drugs. Now NACO would fulfil the long-pending demand from the HIV positive groups. Its availability will be ensured at the government hospitals which have the ART centres as the number of patients requiring the second line medicines is increasing steadily. These drugs are eight to ten times more expensive than the first line drugs.

Right now, 67,000 patients have been given the first line ART, a fixed dose combination of drugs such as stavudine or lamivudine or nevirapine which is affordable and easy to use because it is a one pill twice a day regime. But recently, the World Health Organization has updated its anti retroviral guidelines for HIV/AIDS treatment and has recommended second line therapy for resistant patients.

Since there is no data for resistant patients at the moment, the extent of the problem is unknown. So, the NACO wants a national treatment guideline in place so that patients are not given the second line treatment unnecessarily. There is a need for regulatory control as many patients in the country are unnecessarily on second line drugs.

India is not in a situation like Brazil where half of their government's health budget is spent on procuring second line medicines, stated the NACO DG.

According to a study conducted by a UK-based HIV and AIDS charity organisation AVERT, 90 per cent of all reported AIDS cases in the country have been found in 10 of the 38 states and Union Territories in India. The highest cases are recorded in states of Maharashtra and Gujarat in the west; Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka in the south; and Manipur and West Bengal in the north-east. The total number of AIDS cases is estimated to be 1, 24,995, out of which 88,245 are men are and 36,750 are women.