Solomon treated HIV patients in India as early as 1986.
By Dileep Thekkethil
BENGALURU: Dr. Suniti Solomon, the scientist who headed the team that first found traces of HIV virus in India, passed away on Tuesday morning at her Chennai residence. She was also a pioneer in getting HIV patients in India treated as early as in 1986, when, even doctors were apprehensive about the new disease.
Solomon found India’s first voluntary HIV treatment and counselling center, the Y R Gaitonde Center for AIDS Research and Education (YRG CARE), in Chennai, which is now a premium centre for HIV/AIDS care. She was also a professor of Microbiology at the Madras Medical College.
During the early 80s when the virus started spreading across the world, little was known to the Indian community about the cause and treatment of a virus that was defensive against all medications found till then. It was in that background that Solomon took the blood samples of six female sex-workers and put it under the microscope. The result of the test sent a chill across the spine of Indian medical community as the women were detected HIV positive, the first-ever case of HIV reported in India.
The samples were later sent to Christian Medical College in Vellore for further cross-examination through the ELISA test, which was back then a costly facility available only in a very few hospitals. The same samples were later sent to the John Hopkins University in Maryland, in the US, for further confirmation.
Solomon’s discovery was even read out in the legislative assembly of Tamil Nadu, which congratulated her effort. Later, she voluntarily set up an HIV treatment and counselling center in Chennai. During the same period, she was also working as a professor at the Madras Medical College.
Solomon later became a member of several organisations like National Technical Team on women and AIDS, International AIDS Vaccine Initiative-India, Scientific Committee of National AIDS Research Institute. She was also a permanent member of the Microbicides Committee of the Indian Council for Medical Research and Asia Data Safety Monitoring Board of the Division of AIDS, NIH, in the US.
Solomon was also part of many research programs inside and outside the country. She was a part of the US National Institute of Mental Health’s multi-country HIV/STD prevention trial, the US National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases’ HIV Prevention Trial Networks, NIH award that will measure stigma in health care settings in Southern India, and a Phase III study of 6% CS GEL, a candidate microbicide of CONRAD.
Solomon also played a prominent role as the President of the AIDS society of India. Among her colleagues and patients, she was a dedicated doctor who pledged all her time to treat the people infected with HIV, something many doctors fail to do due to the stigma associated with the disease.