Freedom to live with HIV Suniti Solomon (who first detected HIV infected patient in India)

Freedom to live with HIV Suniti Solomon 
(who first detected HIV infected patient in India) 
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She was a little over 13 when she was kidnapped and forced 
into the sex trade. In 1986, this young girl was one of the first
six people in India that Suniti Solomon detected as being infec-
ted by the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV. 


Since then, Chennai-based Solomon’s life has revolved around 
people affected by AIDS, the condition that HIV causes. “The 
minute someone says he or she is HIV positive, the word which 
crops up in most people’s mind is ‘immoral’,” says 69-year-old 
Dr Solomon, sitting in her office in south Chennai. “She was the
first girl we tested that I spoke to, and she changed me.” 


The young girl, who resisted her assailants for three days, gave 
in after being starved for 72 hours. 6 months later, she managed
to escape, reached a remand home in Mylapore and was one of 
the 100 sex workers that Solomon tested. 


After spending six years at the remand home, she joined Dr Solo-
mon’s non-profit YR Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and 
Education (YRG CARE), established in 1993, but died soon 
after. 


“It was frightening really,” says Dr Solomon, herself the only girl 
among eight children born to the Gaitondes, a Chennai-based 
Maharashtrian Hindu family in the leather trade. 


“My husband was a little worried and didn’t want me to work with 
HIV-positive patients, most of whom at that time were homosexuals,
those who self-injected drugs and sex workers. And I said, look, you
have to listen to their stories and you wouldn’t say the same thing.”


The former teacher of medicine continues to be a counsellor, match-
maker, doctor, researcher and educationist for HIV patients. 


While most of the work in this field in India is geared towards sprea-
ding awareness about the disease, Dr Solomon’s organization 
provides medical help, counselling and employment opportunities for
HIV/AIDS patients. 


Her interest in medicine was triggered by the health officer’s annual 
visits to the Gaitonde home, when the eight children would line up for 
smallpox vaccine shots. She studied at the Madras Medical College, 
where she met her husband, a cardiac surgeon.


For a little under a decade, she trained in pathology in Britain, the US
and Australia, while travelling with her husband. But in 1973 the couple 
returned to settle in India, and work at a government-run hospital. 


She went on to do her doctorate in medicine (MD) in microbiology and
after serving as an assistant professor for a few years at the Madras 
Medical College, became a professor. That is when Dr Solomon, who 
was reading up on HIV/AIDS, decided to track the virus in India. 


With no openly gay community in the country in the 1980s—the first 
cases of HIV in the US were detected among gay men—she and one of 
her doctoral students decided to check the blood samples of female sex 
workers in Chennai. 


“The results of the first six tests were frightening,” she recalls. Accor-
ding to the latest figures from the World Health Organization, an 
estimated 2.5 million people in India are HIV-positive or are afflicted 
by AIDS—the third largest population, after South Africa and Nigeria, 
among the 33 million people affected by the virus worldwide.


“Even if three million are infected, only 20-30% of them know their
status,” Dr Solomon says. The weekly traffic at the YRG CARE clinic 
has gone up by 10 times since 1993; it now has 12,000 registered patients. 


More and more people are able to live longer with the help of drugs that
in some cases now cost just 2% of the earlier rate. But what is distress-
ing to Dr Solomon is the rising percentage of Indian women infected by 
this virus (from 10% of the affected population in the 1990s to 50% now) 
even though 80% of them have single partners. 


Several Indian men often don’t disclose their illness to their families and 
give in to parental pressures to marry, endangering the life of an uninfected 
woman. 


Even if the man practices safe sex after counselling, there comes a time 
when the wife wants a child. “In some part of India, being childless is still 
a bigger stigma than being HIV-positive,” adds Dr Solomon, who herself 
faced a lot of societal pressures before she had her son, nearly 13 years 
after her marriage. 


For Dr Solomon, the biggest joy is when she tests children of infected
parents, usually brought in at 18 months, and the result is negative. 


At the time of our interview, her fridge was stocked with Mysore pak, a 
sweet, because a girl who had been brought to the centre had tested 
negative. 


Her HIV-positive mother had contracted the virus after a transfusion. 
The problems persist. Parental disclosure to HIV-positive children is 
an issue most elders choose to postpone. And then there is the constant
pressure of ensuring her patients take the prescribed medicine. “My
biggest fear is a resistant virus,” says Dr Solomon. 


“Then we would need new drugs, which means more money for research 
to find new drugs.”


Dr. Solomon.