CHENNAI: The early 90s was a period when people were terrorised by HIV. And it was the same time that this young doctor made a tryst with HIV, when she was asked by one of her young patients, “How can you refuse me, without any reason. What wrong did I do? That was a moment of epiphany for Dr Amudha Hari, who went on to help deliver nearly 800 HIV- children, born to HIV+ mothers. She has treated almost 5,000 HIV+ women in the last 16 years. Dr Amudha Hari , a Gynecologist and Laproscopic surgeon, who has done phenomenal work in the area of prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV shares her journey with City Express. She recollects, “My son, had just turned a year old when I first did a c-section on a HIV+ woman. After that I had fallen sick, had developed serious cough, and for the next three months, I lived in constant fear, thinking I had got infected. After mustering some courage, I got myself tested and found that I was HIV-. So I was just another health-care professional, paranoid of getting infected with HIV. Everyone I knew then, advised me to stay away from treating HIV+ people.”"Shortly after that, a 19 year-old girl from Tirupati walked into my clinic. After four months of marriage, she had contracted HIV from her husband, and was pregnant. She was refused treatment by many doctors when her HIV status was disclosed."Amudha says, "The young girl questioned me as to why she had been affected by HIV, when she had committed no mistake." "These words echoed in my head. And that night, I shared it with my husband. He gave me the confidence to help this girl. At that moment, I decided to treat HIV women, and after that, there was no looking back,” she says. Today, Dr Amudha has developed a protocol and has released a CD called Ray of Light, which is used as an educational manual to train health-care professionals. It not only deals with safe deliveries of HIV+ women, but also helps them prepare themselves for maximising the chance of having a baby which is HIV-. She says, “It is painful to watch a child born with HIV. We should do everything within our capacity to maximise the chances of making a child HIV-.”She also runs the Mithras Foundation, which reaches out to the vulnerable children, affected by HIV.
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