Here is rather a heart rendering news. Its saddening to note that HIV is now a reality in Assam too. ________________________
http://sify.com/news/othernews/fullstory.php?id=13678952 HIV-positive boy thrown out of school in Assam Thursday, 24 February , 2005, 14:40 Guwahati: A four-year-old HIV-positive boy has been kicked out of school in Assam under pressure from the parents of his classmates, a rights group said on Thursday. The Assam Network of Positive People (ANPP) said it had appealed to the Assam Human Rights Commission to intervene on behalf of the boy. "This is nothing but a serious crime to have thrown out a little boy from school just because he is HIV-positive," ANPP leader Jahnabi Goswami, who is herself HIV-positive, told AFP. According to the principal of Sishu Niketan primary school, in the industrial town of Namrup in eastern Assam, some parents had threatened to take their children out of class if the infected boy was allowed to stay. "We were forced to dismiss him following pressure from other parents whose children were studying in our school," a school management official said. The parents of the boy had tested HIV-positive five years ago but kept it a secret. When news leaked out, they were ostracised by members of their community. After the boy was barred from classes, they moved to Guwahati, where they are undergoing treatment at a city hospital. In a similar incident, two HIV-positive children were thrown out of school in Kerala in 2003 after parents of other students protested. Government figures put the number of people living with HIV-AIDS in India at 5.1 million -- second only to South Africa -- although health workers say the number is much higher. Some 1,00,000 HIV-positive people live in India's northeast, which borders the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand and has high rates of intravenous drug use. _______________________________________________ Assam mailing list [email protected] http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/listinfo/assam Mailing list FAQ: http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/assam/assam-faq.html To unsubscribe or change options: http://pikespeak.uccs.edu/mailman/options/assam
