BANGALORE: From next year, for the first time in the country, persons with HIV/AIDS may be able to buy themselves a health insurance tailored to their needs.

The Freedom Foundation, a non-governmental organisation in Bangalore, along with the United Nations Development Project, Government of India, and the National Insurance Committee are working together to develop such an insurance policy.

They are planning to offer three kinds of policies that will cover the general population, persons at high risk of developing HIV/AIDS and persons with HIV/AIDS.

Pilot project

From January the policies for persons with HIV/AIDS will be launched in Karnataka and Tamil Nadu on a pilot basis.

Over 250 persons will be covered under this insurance scheme.

"We will cover all AIDS related sicknesses such as tuberculosis and pneumonia under this scheme.

Anti Retroviral Therapy (ART) will also be covered under the scheme," according to Ashok Rau, Executive Director of Freedom Foundation.

Survey

Karnataka and Tamil Nadu have high prevalence of HIV/AIDS cases. The 2004 sentinel survey estimated that 50,000 people in Karnataka were affected by the disease.

The HIV prevalence levels ranged from 1.5 per cent among women at antenatal clinics to 21.6 per cent for female sex workers. The percentage of pregnant women who tested positive at antenatal clinics in Bangalore Rural was 2.5 and 0.6 per cent in Bangalore Urban. The HIV prevalence rate in Tamil Nadu was 0.68 per cent.

Mr. Rau said the Freedom Foundation was working on an insurance model that they hoped would be commercially lucrative so that more insurance companies could join them in providing cover to people with the disease.

So far, most insurance companies have kept out insuring persons with HIV/AIDS because they believed it was too expensive to provide insurance cover to them. But Mr. Rau said that since only a little over 1 per cent of the general population was affected, he believed that the claims would not be too heavy for insurance companies to handle. "In almost 96 per cent of the cases, the insurance companies will not be handling any claims. So, it should not be very difficult for them to cover persons with HIV/AIDS," he said.

HIV/AIDS positive persons are thrilled by the prospects of an insurance that will cover them.

Most persons now get into some kind of insurance cover without disclosing their status but are finding it very hard to prove that they were not infected six months before they took the insurance. "An insurance that covers persons with HIV/AIDS will be a boon to the affected," according to R. Elango, President of the Karnataka Positive Network.

Help in Nigeria

The foundation has been asked by the Nigerian Government and the World Health Organisation to help control the spread of HIV/AIDS in Nigeria and Botswana.

It was for the first time that the help of an Indian organisation had been sought by the Government.

"We are happy that people have recognised our efforts. We will work with the same intensity in the African state to try and control the spread of the disease," Mr. Rau said.

Nigeria had been identified as one of the high-risk states by the sentinel survey. More than 39 million people are living with HIV across the world. Nigeria ranks third after India and South Africa. There are more than 50,000 children affected by the disease.

The disease, according to recent studies, affects around 1.2 million orphans representing 9.4 per cent of the population under 15 years.

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