Bhubaneswar: Patients affected with AIDS still have to live with the stigma surrounding the disease despite all the awareness campaigns run by the governments and non government organisations (NGOs) for the past several years. Not only strangers, but near and dear ones of the afflicted patient have treated them like outcasts. The stigma follows the patients and innocent children as well.
Such an unfortunate incident came to fore in the city where a body has been kept at the Capital Hospital for the last three days but no one claimed the body of a patient. The deceased is a resident of Nayagarh village. He was afflicted with the dreaded disease during his stay at Surat in Gujarat few years ago.
Unaware of the fact, the man returned to the state due to repeated illness and started living a normal life with his wife and children. It came as a shock as the doctors informed him that he, along with his wife and two children, had AIDS.
Soon, the news spread in the village and they were driven out. The family started living as an outcast outside the village. The man’s relatives, in-laws and his own brothers and parents snapped all the ties them.
Subsequently, his wife also died few months later due to prolonged illness. The man was recently shifted from Nayagarh hospital and was undergoing treatment in the general male ward at Capital Hospital for the last ten days. The patient was shifted to Infection and Diarrhoea ward after the medical officers came to know about his disease. The patient passed away at the ward, December 3.
Subsequently, police informed both his family and in-laws to receive his body from hospital but none came. Meanwhile, an NGO working at the hospital sent the deceased’s elder son, aged around seven years, to a childline center here.
According to sources, the deceased’s body has been kept at the mortuary and will be disposed off, Saturday by BMC and police.
The unfortunate incident bares open the futility of massive awareness campaign to make it easy for the AIDS affected patients to live with all dignity.