HIV-1 Infection and Drug-Abuse in India-An Emerging Challenge
- 1 University of Miami, United States
Abstract
India has a population of over 1 billion and the first cases of HIV-1 infection were reported from there in 1987. Since then HIV-infection has spread there very aggressively and at present it is reported that there may be 5.7 millions individuals infected with HIV. Unlike the western countries where the infected HIV-1 virus belongs to clade B, in India it is clade C. A number of structural and functional differences in these two strains can lead to very different pathogenesis. What we know about pathogenesis due to HIV-1 infection is mostly due to studies carried out in the west where the infecting clade is B. Studies on clade C are very few and to meet this challenge research on HIV-1 C clade infection should be carried out on priority bases. Recently NIH funded projects in India are attempting to initiate research on HIV-1 infection. The epidemiology and belief systems in India are additional challenges to carrying out HIV research. There is an urgent need to initiate multi-disciplinary research.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3844/ajidsp.2007.191.194
Copyright: © 2007 Mahendra Kumar, Adarsh M. Kumar, Raymond Ownby, Deborah L. Jones and Drenna Waldrop-Valverde. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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Keywords
- HIV
- AIDS
- India
- Clade C