SC forces govt to agree to second-line ART to all AIDS patients

NEW DELHI: The Centre on Friday tried everything -- from huge costs to irrational treatment by private hospitals -- to express reservations about extending second-line treatment to all HIV positive patients, but the Supreme Court used the right to life argument to counter them.
The government had said it was willing to extend second-line treatment costing Rs 28,500 each to all patients except those irrationally treated by private hospitals.
But a Bench comprising Chief Justice S H Kapadia and Justices K S Radhakrishnan and Swatanter Kumar wondered how the government could cite financial burden as a ground to deny treatment to a section that might have been irrationally treated by private hospitals.
"It is a question of right to life guaranteed under Article 21 of the Constitution and the government cannot say finances are a constraint," the Bench said.
Solicitor general Gopal Subramaniam realised the weight of the Bench's logic and abandoned the financial constraint argument to clarify that the Centre was more concerned about the capacity to treat rather than finances. There were only 10 viral-load testing centres, he said.
However, the capacity constraint argument too sounded far fetched as the SG himself pointed out that till now, the government had received data identifying only 122 HIV patients who might have been treated irrationally by private hospitals and possibly face the risk of not getting the second-line treatment, exclusively offered by centres run by government.
In an affidavit before the SC, National AIDS Control Authority (NACO) had said second-line ART for HIV patients could not be extended to those who had received "irrational treatment" by private medical practitioners. It said such persons were either switched to second-line treatment at an early stage or were put directly on second-line drugs without undergoing the preliminary treatment, thus making them hard cases.
Faced with the SC's right to life argument, Subramaniam clarified that "if any such case (irrational treatment) came to government centres, we will do our best".
The Bench asked the SG to get a clarification next week about the Centre's stand on working out the modalities for treatment of HIV patients.