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On a regular day, a staff nurse from the
operation theatre makes an emergency call to the laboratory, and only she is aware of the number of times she does that before any surgical
procedure and asks “HIV / HBsAg?”, “ Negative Sister, your name? ” we reply and also inquire for confidentiality purpose and inform the much needed report. The PPM
(Personal Protective Measures) and other procedures that is to be followed in addition to the ones already in practice is
another ordeal if the status is otherwise positive.
Meanwhile in the obstetrics
department a pregnant lady waits for her report, a pathologist gets pricked
accidentally during sampling, a surgeon is already undergoing post exposure
prophylaxis, a newly married couple is undergoing counselling in the PPTCTC
(Prevention Of Parent To Child Transmission Centre), a high risk patient
refuses testing in fear of the result, an already diagnosed patient thinks maybe
the infection is of less harm than the treatment, a doctor worries about his
patient’s CD 4 count or about the recent cold or cough he developed, many consent
forms are signed, blood vials are fed into the machines for testing, Western
Blots are run for retest, reference laboratories are contacted, statistics
worked upon and health authorities informed. Day in and out, HIV/AIDS looms around
us like a death eater in hood, outside as well as inside the hospitals. There is no person or organ of him/ her that it spares. Having
said that and experienced it from a doctor’s perspective what compels me to
write this post is the recent hubbub about it.
This is what our health
minister had to say:
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And the reporters reported that he said:
And then the clarifications, explanations and discussions that followed:
- INDIA TODAY- Harsh Vardhan clarifies: Have no moral problem with condoms but they do break sometimes
I have
tried compiling most of the news that I could come across since yesterday and
they are here in this list, after having read them I can only agree with Edward
Murrow, the American journalist who puts matters such as these in perfect sense
by saying “We
are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that’s the show business”. While
our tweets and status updates are adding to the heated argument on what he said and
why he said so, we need to realize that any point which we think and put across is
futile unless it goes beyond the ‘condom vs culture’ debate because ‘HIV/AIDS’
is not just about that. We all have our share of responsibility in making and taking such news. I
wish the science of our minds; be it the ministers, the policy makers, the
reporters or the readers who read and react to this was more sensible than
sensitive. Criticizing anyone or anything here serves no purpose. As an
adult, as a person of medicine, as someone who has read enough about the virus
and the disease and who has seen the ones battling this infection my
understanding is based only on my learning and experience, well I have tried to put it up in a
picture today:
“Viruses have no morality, no sense of good and evil, the
deserving or the undeserving.... AIDS is not the swift sword with which the
Lord punishes the evil practitioners of male homosexuality and intravenous drug
use. It is simply an opportunistic virus that does what it has to do to stay
alive.”
-
Chris Crutcher in King of
the Mild Frontier –
As straight as that.
-R.
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