Padma Shri Dr. Suniti Solomon.⁠

 ‘What is killing people with AIDS more is the stigma and discrimination", once said #PadmaShri Dr Suniti Solomon.⁠

Dr. Suniti diagnosed the first Indian #AIDS cases among the #Chennai sex workers in 1986 along with her student Sellappan Nirmala.⁠
⁠
Her work took India's medical fraternity by storm, pushing the government to act on it and bringing the reality of the virus home to India.⁠
⁠
“The government refused to believe the tests. They could not believe that a country like India – deemed culturally superior to the West – could have the virus. Only after the samples were sent to Washington and confirmed positive that the government accepted Dr. Suniti’s tests."⁠
⁠
When Dr..Suniti passed away in 2015, The New Yorker stated this:⁠
“As HIV swept across the world, in the mid-nineteen-eighties, no country possessed a more menacing mix of conditions, predilections, and the kind of poverty likely to hasten an AIDS epidemic than India… Many researchers predicted a crisis unlike those in any other nation. ⁠
⁠
But it never happened — partly because India had Suniti Solomon, the AIDS-treatment pioneer who died on Tuesday at the age of seventy-six."⁠
⁠03-12-2022 saturday