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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

‘Playing with the lives of HIV patients’: Drug shortages force many to change medication regime -Tabassum Barnagarwala

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Taking available medicines instead of what has been prescribed could lead to drug resistance and even death.

Nongmeikapam Dusmanta, a retired government employee from the water resources department in Manipur, has battled with HIV, or human immunodeficiency virus, for over two decades.

He has seen the evolution of India’s battle against AIDS – acquired immune deficiency syndrome, an HIV-led disease that severely damages the immune system – from a time when there were no free diagnostics or treatment for it, to the setting up of antiretroviral therapy in 2004, and the hurdles that followed it.

But never before, he said, has the struggle been so hard. In Imphal where he lives, the antiretroviral centre at the Regional Institute of Medical Sciences is asking patients to switch to another drug regimen after crucial HIV drugs have run out of stock in government centres.

Dusmanta has refused.

The 67-year-old requires a combination of four drugs: abacavir, lamivudine, ritonavir and lopinavir.

Instead, the antiretroviral centre, which provides free medicines under the government’s National AIDS Control Programme, is giving him three other drugs: tenofovir, lamivudine and dolutegravir, or TLD in short.

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