HIV IS fast spreading its tentacles in India. According to the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), more than 300 people have contacted AIDS since the first case was reported in India in 1986. It is feared that by the turn of the century, about five million persons in the country will be infected.

While the Indian government has launched a few programmes to check the spread of AIDS, not much seems to be happening on the basic research front. What little AIDS research is being done, is largely epidemiological.

Says S P Tripathy, director general of the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), "For one, we don't have the means to carry out basic research on AIDS. For another, our main concern should be containing the spread of this scourge; for a basic understanding of the disease, we can rely on the West."

Some other salient studies are: tracing the changing profile of different HIV strains in AIDS patients; the role of cofactors, such as venereal disease, in occasioning AIDS and HIV-wrought changes in the immune system, such as reduction in the number of CD4 cells.

Indian researchers are in the dark about the precise nature of HIV strains. Tripathy says, "India's immediate interest is in the therapeutic vaccine." Under the present circumstances, it would be impossible to find normal people willing to take the AIDS vaccine shots. Therefore, he adds, "preventive vaccine is meaningless for us".

ICMR, in collaboration with the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), has drawn up a programme, called the Preparation of AIDS Vaccine Evaluation (PAVE) project, to test vaccines in India. The preliminaries to the actual trials of the vaccine are to be undertaken within the next two years.

NIH has already allocated $800,000 for the PAVE project, which will be coordinated by the National AIDS Research Institute (NARI) in Pune. An important role of NARI would be to determine the biological and behavioural patterns of HIV transmission for the purpose of conducting vaccine trials in the future.