The Hindu : Tamil Nadu / Chennai News : Madras University hosts Red Ribbon Club workshop

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Sep 15, 2005

Tamil Nadu

Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Madras University hosts Red Ribbon Club workshop

Staff Reporter

Through these clubs, the NSS will create AIDS awareness among college students

JOINT EFFORTS: Madras University's Vice Chancellor, S.P. Thyagarajan (left), listens to Regina Pappa, TANSACS consultant at the inaugural of the University Red Ribbon Club workshop on Wednesday. R. Veerasekaran (left), Station Liaison officer, NSS ce ll, looks on. — Photo: Vino John

CHENNAI: The University of Madras hosted a Red Ribbon Club Management Workshop in association with the Tamil Nadu State AIDS Control Society (TANSACS) at its Centenary Building on Wednesday. The workshop marks a new role for NSS programme coordinators from this academic year onwards with the TANSACS deciding to use the universities and NSS units for improving HIV awareness among young people and rural communities by the formation of Red Ribbon Clubs in all affiliated colleges.

S.P. Thyagarajan, Vice-Chancellor, University of Madras, recalled the collaborations that had enabled the detection of HIV for the first time in 1986 and said collaborations such as these were very important to bring socially relevant issues into the public realm.

Concern

``Projections predicted that, by 2004, India would be another sub-Saharan Africa. It is thanks to our awareness and HIV prevention programme, in which Tamil Nadu has been setting a model for the rest of the country, that prevalence rates have come down significantly,'' he said.

He expressed concern over the rise in the HIV case detections among young people and talked of the need for HIV education to be targeted at specific groups.

R. Veerasekaran, State Liaison Officer, Tamil Nadu NSS Cell, said the NSS was promoting the cause of AIDS awareness by enforcing disciplined behaviour and stressed the need to create peer educators to take the message to more students.

B. Regina Pappa, CDC Consultant and Communication Strategist, TANSACS, said the AIDS pandemic was killing 8,000 people a day and that the task of educating young people needed to be taken up urgently. Jacob C. Varghese from the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, and she also took separate technical sessions with the NSS coordinators.

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