HIV / AIDS prevention through peer education in India.

If my wife doesn’t ‘cooperate’ I kick her. If she still doesn’t cooperate I go out” said a 35-year-old male participant of the “Train the Trainers” workshop in Nellore Andhra Pradesh India. He’s not talking about cooperating with domestic matters like housecleaning. He’s talking about sex. He changed his words to ‘negotiate’ or ‘communicate’ after participating in a four-day information exchange on HIV/AIDS prevention through peer education. It was a small victory although there is still work to be done of course. I work with the Peer Education Program of Los Angeles (PEP/LA) and was invited to Southern India by the non-governmental organization (NGO) Health Education and Rural Training Society (HEARTS). Mr. Choppavarapu Prasanna Kumar President of HEARTS had read about the success of PEP/LA’s international efforts in HIV/AIDS prevention in AIDSLink and contacted PEP/LA with the hopes of establishing peer education programs (PEPs) in Nellore India. He was well aware of the devastation that HIV/AIDS had already inflicted on his country with reports of more than 4 million Indians infected with HIV. There were estimations that 3500 people were infected each day with the number of adults with HIV doubling every 18 months. Because of insufficient funds for adequate surveillance techniques testing sites and medical clinics in Nellore Mr. Kumar felt that these ‘official’ numbers hardly indicted the harsh reality of the impact of the AIDS epidemic on India. His assumption of underreporting was confirmed with warnings from the World Bank stating “…that without adequate prevention efforts 35 million Indians could be living with HIV/AIDS by the year 2005. Prevention efforts are lagging dangerously behind the epidemic’s growth. The future of the country is tragically imperiled.” (excerpt)