Isha Foundation launches AIDS awareness programme

24 September, 2006

COIMBATORE: Isha Foundation on Saturday launched a programme to spread awareness on Acquired Immuno Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) in rural areas of the State.One lakh people are part of its Action for Rural Rejuvenation (ARR) Programme that was initiated in August 2003.

The foundation said the ARR was a social outreach programme that sought to provide basic health care, medical relief and educational facilities to over 1,250 villages in the State using its mobile units. These vans would now be used to spread the message on AIDS.

The foundation said it wanted to reach out to the masses that had very little or no knowledge of AIDS as information on the disease had not reached the interior areas. Besides street plays, the foundation also planned to involve those affected by the disease to counsel people in these areas. The programme would focus on dispelling myths about the disease; educate people on how it was contracted.

Addressing the programme inaugural, National Information Officer, United Nations, New Delhi, Rajiv Chandran, said it was vital to reach awareness on HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) and AIDS to the grassroots level - the needed to spread knowledge of the disease and help in checking it.

The former chairman of Sir Ganga Ram Hospital, New Delhi, S.K. Sama, said the stigma attached to the disease had to be tackled through effective education of the people. It was earlier thought that only sex workers, truckers and drug addicts contracted HIV. After knowing that transfusion of infected blood was another way of contracting it, the Government had ordered mandatory screening of blood and blood products. Discrimination of children of the HIV infected in schools should end. With the rural masses being the most vulnerable, educating them was important. TNAU Vice-Chancellor C. Ramasamy said effective steps should be taken to check the spread of HIV as poor health among the people would affect the overall development of the nation.

The founder of Isha Foundation, Jaggi Vasudev, said responsible social action was needed to make crucial intervention to check the spread of the disease.

The Chairman of the Modicare Foundation, Samir Modi, touched upon the benefits of sensitizing rural masses to the disease and ways to prevent it.