I meant to post this yesterday and now invoke my ethnic background to excuse my tardiness.

While my laptop’s already suffering from too much spyware to withstand finding a cure for HIV, I did want to note World AIDS Day in some way. Via Anupam Chander, I see that HIV+ women in Golaghat, Assam joined a rally “to acknowledge they are living with AIDS and should not be shunned.” From what I can tell, India is doing surprisingly well, particularly compared to some African nations, in admitting its HIV crisis. When I last visited in 2003, there were bilboards with giant pictures of condoms, which is something I’ve never seen even in Houston or Dallas, where conservatism appear to be greater than in Bombay and Hyderabad. Though the government is unwilling to say just how big the population of HIV+ Indians is — as a NYT editorial puts it, “India is providing numbers no one believes” — it has not gone through the lengthy period of denial that the U.S. government did in the 1980s, which allowed HIV to threaten to become epidemic among margnialized groups.

The problem now is getting treatment to sufferers, and unlike the issue of accepting the existence of the disease (though that certainly is far from complete, and contributes to the difficulty of accessing treatment), seems likely to get worse, not better. The WTO is supposed to be giving developing nations more time to comply with patent rules, but Indian already reformed its laws last year. This has had the benefit of drawing large pharmaceutical companies who previously feared that their investments would be unprotected. On the downside, however, are millions of Indians who cannot afford the cost of a patented drug and whose salvation previously had been the cheap generics that local drug makers had pirated. Continue reading →

In 1998, Nidha Mubdi, a student at St. John’s University in New York, discovered during a routine checkup that she had leukemia. After much searching through SAMAR, a donor named Himesh Kapadia stepped forward:

The bone marrow donation saved her life, but Mubdi’s kidneys began failing because of chemotherapy, and she’s been on dialysis for the last five years. But earlier this month, Derek Ivery, a friend from Queens College, gave her one of his kidneys, a much more serious operation:

Mubdi’s family members were tested to see if they could donate a kidney, but no one came up as a match. [Link]

Ivery, of Queens, decided to step forward after Mubdi put out a call for a donor on the Internet. They had met when when they were student advisers at Queens College… Mubdi’s grateful father, Shelley Mubdi, a Bangladeshi immigrant who is president of Medina Masjid, a Manhattan mosque, called Ivery, a “courageous man…”

Ivery, 26, and Mubdi, 25, were resting comfortably at New York Presbyterian/Columbia Hospital last night after the nine-hour operation. [Link]

Continue reading →