Twenty-three inmates of the Gorakhpur District Jail have been testd positive for HIV in the last eight months.
On the instructions of senior officials, several health camps were organised at the prison and 23 inmates, including a woman, were found HIV positive, Jail Superintendent Ramdhani Muni said.
During the camps, spread over eight months, 1,400 prisoners underwent tests to check for HIV, the officer said.
They are being treated at the ART (Anti-Retroviral Therapy) centre of the BRD Medical College and Hospital, the superintendent said.
There are more than 1,800 inmates in the jail, tests for the remaining prisoners would be conducted soon, the officer said.
Jail authorities have also sought the help of counsellors for those found HIV positive, an official said.
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The report has come within a month after a quack was booked in Uttar Pradesh's Unnao district after at least 46 people were found infected with HIV at a tehsil in in the last 10 months. The quack was booked over the allegation that his use of a common syringe led to the spurt in such cases.
The National AIDS Control Organisation’s recently launched prisons intervention programme had found that a large number of prison inmates contract HIV because of unsafe sex and the sharing of needles within prisons.
A study conducted at Arthur Road jail in Mumbai 2006 had showed that prisoners often indulge in homosexuality, which could be either consensual or coercive.
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The National AIDS Control Organisation had launched its prisons intervention programme in 2016 in Punjab, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland and Meghalaya. The organisation now plans to expand the programme to 90 prisons including in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan.
There hasn’t been much studies conducted about the prevalence of HIV positive cases among prisoners in India. It has now raised concerns that HIV positive inmates can cause the disease spread outside the prison when they leave the prisons after acquittal or when their term ends.
