JJ’S ART centre completes 20 yrs
MUMBAI: JJ Hospital’s Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) Centre, the country’s first ART centre which has treated 43,080 HIV patients to date, completed 20 years on April 1. ART is the treatment of people infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) using anti-hiv drugs, helping prolong the lives of patients with HIV/AIDS.
The first ART centre was started on April 1, 2004, in JJ Hospital. Dr Alka Deshpande, former in-charge of the ART centre said that as per the then guidelines, the patient had to be in the stage of AIDS to receive treatment.
Dr Deshpande said the hospital had started an HIV outpatient department in 1990. “We already had many patients, but there was no treatment. We were just counselling them apart from providing supportive treatment and managing opportunistic infection. The expenses were taken from the hospital budget,” she said.
In 2004, the ART treatment only started when a patient’s CD4 count (immune system function in people with HIV) was less than 200. “Now, the treatment is given irrespective of CD4 count. People with ART have now survived for more than 25 years,” said Dr Deshpande.
Dr Priya Patil, head of the medicine department, at JJ Hospital, said the drug treatment for HIV has also changed. “Now we have better drugs, and the major impact is that the patient’s longevity has increased. Their viral load has decreased and that’s probably why the transmission from this patient to other people has decreased,” she said.
Talking about the journey to establish the first ART centre, Dr Deshpande, who was the technical expert on the National Aids Control Organisation and developed the guidelines along with training the doctors, said, “It was UNAIDS passing the resolution that health is a human right and government should take responsibility and provide treatment that gave the momentum. We trained many doctors first on how to start treatment, when to start, how to continue and how to monitor the side effects.”
A 70-year-old patient, one of the oldest patients of the centre, said she has seen a transformation of HIV patients being treated as a social taboo to being accepted. Dr Deshpande said with longevity going up in HIV patients, the new challenges are other age-related problems. “HIV is no longer the concern like it used to be 20 years back when we started the ART centre,” she said.