Eminent HIV researcher Dr. Suniti Solomon, who was part of the team that detected the first HIV case in India in 1986, has passed away at the age of 76. She had been under treatment for two months for liver cancer.
Suniti Solomon set up the first voluntary testing and counseling center and an AIDS research group in Chennai. She held prestigious posts in various national organizations that worked for HIV positive people and was the principal investigator of several pioneering HIV research studies.
Her pioneering HIV research studies include the US National Institute of Mental Health’s multi-country HIV/STD Prevention Trial. Trained in pathology in the UK and USA, her experience covers a wide range of aspects linked to HIV infection, biomedical parameters to socio-economics.
Globally, an estimated 36.9 million [34.3–41.4 million] people were living with HIV in 2014, and 2.6 million [2.4–2.8 million] of these were children.
If the reproduction of the HIV virus stops, then the body’s immune cells are able to live longer and provide the body with protection from infections.
According to 2014 figures, most of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa and were infected by their HIV-positive mothers during pregnancy, childbirth or breastfeeding.
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