Mizoram Governor, DoNER Ministry Secretary and the Civil Societies have separately expressed their concern over the rise of AIDS/HIV cases in the northeastern state, bordering Myanmar and Bangladesh, officials said on Friday.

DoNER (Development of North Eastern Region) Ministry Secretary Inder Jit Singh said that the Mizoram government has to make massive effort to check the growing spread of AIDS/HIV in the bordering state.

Singh, who is now on a three-day visit to Mizoram to study the ongoing projects funded by the Union DoNER Ministry, on Thursday called on state Governor P.S. Sreedharan Pillai at Raj Bhavan here and discussed the rising AIDS/HIV cases in Mizoram among other issues.

Singh said that the growing cases of AIDS/HIV in Mizoram are a big problem that needs to be attended immediately with all out efforts.

The top leadership of the Young Mizo Association (YMA), a most influential body in Mizoram, recently met the governor and sought his help to strengthen cooperation between the government and NGOs in order to fight against drugs abuse and HIV/AIDS on a war footing.

YMA President Vanlalruata told IANS over phone on Friday that according to the Mizoram State’s AIDS Control Society around 2.04 per cent of state’s total population is HIV infected.

“We are not sure whether the data on HIV/AIDS is correct or not, but a war-footing measures needs to be taken by all stakeholders to check the spread of the dreaded disease,” the youth leader said.

The YMA leaders apprised the governor that the free movement of people along the India-Myanmar border villages has led to an increase in the supply and smuggling of drugs from Myanmar.

Mizoram has an unfenced international border of 404 kms with Myanmar and 318 kms with Bangladesh. While the Border Security Force guards the Bangladesh border, the border with Myanmar is secured by the Assam Rifles.

With 10,91,014 population (2011 census), Christian dominated Mizoram is the second least populous state in the country.

The Governor while addressing an official function here said that HIV/AIDS has become a major problem and needs to tackle this problem on a war-footing manner.

“We need to create mass awareness and movement to ensure that this disease is rapidly checked and its growth arrested. I appreciate the efforts of the church, NGOs and voluntary organisations in tackling this menace, and I believe, if we join our hands together, we can win this battle,” the Governor said.

He said that the state government has recently launched an improved Mizoram State Health Care Scheme which aims to provide health insurance to beneficiaries especially economically backward classes and every citizens must make the best use of this scheme. 

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Dementia poses a threat to global health on the same scale as HIV and Aids, the Dutch government has said, warning that the number of people with the condition will not be far off the population of Germany by 2030.

In a speech to the World Dementia Council summit in Japan on Friday, Hugo de Jonge, the Dutch health minister, said dementia was underfunded, misunderstood and overlooked, as HIV and Aids were in their early days.

“Only when it became clear how quickly the epidemic of HIV/Aids was taking hold … taking millions of lives around the globe, did a global awareness emerge,” De Jonge said. “A huge sense of urgency arose … and around 15 years after the epidemic first took hold, an effective treatment had been found.

“Today, we are on the verge of another epidemic; not a disease that attacks our immune systems, but our brain, our memory, our personality, ourselves. Like HIV/Aids in its early days, dementia is a globally underfunded area of medicine.”

He pointed out that if all people believed to have dementia lived in one country, it would be roughly the size of Spain, and cited predictions that by 2030, this hypothetical nation would contain nearly 75 million people. “By then, it should become a member of the G7,” De Jonge said.

“The costs of dementia care by that time are estimated at a staggering $2tn (£1.6tn). No one should be in any doubt: dementia is one of the biggest medical and social challenges we’ll face in the years ahead. In some countries, it already is the main cause of death.”

Prof Philip Scheltens, the director of the Alzheimer Centre at UMC teaching hospital in Amsterdam, has lobbied the Dutch government for serious investment in research.

“The comparison with Aids is often made,” he said. “The urgency is unbelievably huge, as it was at the time, although it might be better to compare it with cancer. There is still no medicine and we need to go back to the drawing board to understand dementia. The worldwide budget must go up.”

The Netherlands will also call for other countries at the G20 health ministers’ meeting this weekend in Okayama, Japan, to participate in a joint research programme. In July next year, Amsterdam will host a strategy summit for 6,000 researchers.

Lenny Shallcross, the executive director of the World Dementia Council, who was at the Japan summit, said: “Dementia is the biggest health challenge of the 21st century.”

Hilary Evans, the chief executive of Alzheimer’s Research UK, said the Aids comparison was appropriate.

“One in three people born today will develop this devastating condition in their lifetime, unless we find new ways to prevent and treat the diseases,” she said.

“We’ve seen what can successfully be achieved in other areas of health by a movement of people coming together to call for change, tackle stigma and drive radical and sustained increases in research funding.

“Thanks to this research investment, today HIV is no longer a terminal condition in many countries, and research has changed so many lives. We want to see the same for dementia and the 50 million people worldwide affected by the condition.”

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Several major strides have been made towards a cure for HIV in recent years, and now, researchers from the University of California San Diego (UCSD) may have found a new potential target. In lab tests, the team identified a cellular “switch” that could be turned off to clear out the virus lying dormant inside cells.

Currently, people with HIV undergo a life-long treatment called antiretroviral therapy, which suppresses symptoms and keeps the infection from developing into AIDS. But it isn’t a full cure – the virus can lay dormant inside a patient’s cells, ready to start multiplying again if the treatment is ever stopped.

Finding ways to kill the virus while it lays dormant is the holy grail of HIV research, and now the UCSD team says it’s a step closer to a cure. They found that a particular RNA molecule appears to be elevated in people with HIV, and in tests on cultured cells they showed that silencing or removing it prevented HIV from recurring after antiretroviral therapy was stopped.

The molecule is what’s known as a long non-coding RNA (lncRNA), meaning it doesn’t encode for proteins but instead helps control the switching of genes on and off within a cell. The team has dubbed this particular molecule HIV-1 Enhanced LncRNA (HEAL). Interestingly, the HEAL gene appears to have emerged fairly recently, and it regulates HIV replication in immune cells.

“This is one of the key switches that the HIV field has been searching for three decades to find,” says Tariq Rana, an author of the study. “The most exciting part of this discovery has not been seen before. By genetically modifying a long noncoding RNA, we prevent HIV recurrence in T cells and microglia upon cessation of antiretroviral treatment, suggesting that we have a potential therapeutic target to eradicate HIV and AIDS.”

In experiments on isolated human immune cells in the lab, the researchers either silenced HEAL, or snipped it out of the genome using the gene-editing tool CRISPR-Cas9. In both cases, HIV didn’t re-emerge after the antiretroviral therapy stopped.

“Our results suggest that HEAL plays a critical role in HIV pathogenesis,” says Rana. “Further studies are needed to explain the mechanism that leads to HEAL expression after an individual is infected by HIV, but this finding could be exploited as a therapeutic target.”

Of course, this is a very early test, and it hasn’t yet been performed in animals, let alone humans. Still, it’s an interesting new avenue for research into a potential cure.

And it’s not the only one scientists are investigating. Earlier this year a team used a new type of antiretroviral therapy called LASER ART to suppress the virus, then snipped it out using CRISPR – effectively curing the infection in mice. Another team used stem cells to put a man into long-term remission for only the second time ever – but the treatment itself was dangerous, painful and not likely to be recommended to general patients in its current form.

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