Mumbai:
There is an acute shortage of HIV testing kits in Mumbai as a result of which hundreds of people coming in for the tests have to go back.
The writing is on the wall for India's fight against HIV. For weeks now over 70 testing centres in Mumbai like the one at Mumbai's KEM Hospital have been turning away those coming in for voluntary testing.
Hundreds of blood samples taken from patients suspected of having HIV lie untested.
",We don't have kits to test for HIV. All major hospitals have no kits,", said Dr Amar Pazhare, Head, HIV-AIDs Unit, KEM.
On an average HIV centers across Mumbai test over 45,000 people month using kits supplied by the National Aids Control Organisation.
But with existing stocks running out it's reduced the number of tests in a city that has one of the largest HIV + populations in the country.
The main reason for the shortage: Testing kits ordered by NACO, nearly eight months ago from an Indian agency were found to faulty and could not be distributed to testing centres.
NACO officials do not want to come on camera but they say this shortage has spread beyond Mumbai and hit testing in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Himachal Pradesh.
So now NACO has ordered 20 million testing kits mainly from international agencies like the UNICEF and UNOPS.
But these will take at least five months to arrive while the current stock in Mumbai will last only a month.
Questions are now being raised over whether NACO could have acted faster to make up the shortfall.