Army colonel among six held with psychotropic drugs

IMPHAL, Feb 24 : A Colonel of the Indian Army and an Assistant Manager of a private airline are among six persons apprehended by Thoubal district police commandos for their alleged involvement in smuggling of psychotropic drugs worth nearly Rs 30 crores. The army officer has been identified as Public Relations Officer of Public Information Bureau, Defence Wing (PRO/DW) Col Ajay Chowdhury and the Assistant Manager (Indigo Airlines/Security Staff) as one Ngairangbam Brojendro (40) s/o (L) Gya-neshor of Kakwa Khongnang Pheidekpi.
The six, including the Colonel are in the custody of Kakching police and three cases have been filed against them. They will be produced before the Court of the Thoubal CJM tomorrow.
The drugs having high composition of Pseudoephedrine Hydrochloride were reportedly seized at near Pallel police check point from three vehicles, including a white-coloured Bolero Jeep (MN04A/8390) occupied by the army Colonel and the Assistant Manager.
Speaking to the media at New Delhi, Army Spokesperson Colonel Jagdeep Dahiya said, “Colonel Ajay Chou-dhury has been arrested on Sunday morning by the Manipur police along with five other persons. We have been made to believe that certain contrabands have been recovered. We would like to state this much that if he is found guilty as per the law of the land, strick disciplinary action will be taken against him.” An Army officer on condition of anonymity said that the Army will not intervene and asserted that it is a civil case. If found guilty, the law will take its own course, he added. The Bolero Jeep was leading the two other four wheelers - a white colour Bolero Jeep (AS01BA/8699) and a Tata Safari SUV (MN02A/0369) also of white colour.
All three vehicles were heading in the direction of Moreh this morning, said a source while disclosing that Colonel Ajay Chowdhury initially resisted a civil-dressed Manipur police intelligence officer's personal intimation that checking of all vehicles crossing Pallel check post is mandatory. Even though Ajay Chowdhury identified himself as Army PRO and moved on, a team of Pallel post Thoubal district police commando led by Sub Inspector Dhanabir stopped the three-vehicle convoy after it had proceeded a few metres from Pallel police check post.
The commando team detained the vehicle occupants at gun point as the Colonel refused to alight and later spotted a huge drug consignment on further checking the vehicles. The drugs were found loaded in the back-seats and rear compartments of the three vehicles with two occupants in each vehicle. The one in which Ajay Chowdhury was riding on had the inscriptions 'Government of India',
'Ministry of Defence' and 'Army PRO Imphal' on the front side of the vehicle with a beacon light on top while the others had 'Army' stickers in red on their windscreens.
Number plate of the Colonel's vehicle (MN04A/8390) is suspected to be a fictitious one as another registration number (MN04A/6968) was also detected under the former.
From the Bolero Jeep occupied by the Colonel and Brojendro, the police commandos recovered the drugs carried in three carton boxes, six polythene bags, a haversack and one large suitcase.
The second Bolero had five carton boxes, one polythene bag and two large-sized bags containing the drugs and was driven by one Haopu Haokip (28) s/o (L) Thangjam of Langol Games Village Zone-II with the occupant identified as one Minthang Doungel (29) s/o Lunkhohao of New Checkon (New Lambulane).
From the Tata Safari, that was at the rear of the convoy, the police commandos recovered the drugs contained in eight gunny bags, five air-bags and one carton box.
One Minlal Haokip (25) s/o (L) Otkhokai of New Checkon near Brighter Academy was reportedly driving the vehicle with RK Babloo (25) s/o Bijen of Top Khongnangkhong, Porompat DC Road as the occupant.
Babloo is said to be a personnel of 165 Infantry Batta- lion, currently posted in Assam.
The seized drugs totalling 3,30,440 strips and estimated to worth about Rs 24,95,66,000 included the brands Omkof, Respifed, Polyfed-C, Trep, Actidin and Hilcold-T, all having pseudoephedrine Hydrochloride composition.
Thoubal district Police Superintendent (SP) Dr Ak Jhaljit, who arrived at Pallel soon after confiscation of the drugs declined to comment on the matter. The drugs seized today is the largest haul in recent times.
On January 11, a team of Special investigation Unit (SIU), formed under Imphal West district police seized pseudoephedrine Hydrocloride drugs worth about Rs 1.4 crores from Imphal (Tulihal) Airport.
Following strong criticism from various sections of the society against disbanding the SIU soon after the Airport haul as well as demanding disclosure of the real smuggler(s)'s identity, the State Cabinet eventually decided to hand over the case to CBI for further investigation.
Forty-nine years old Col Ajay Chowdhury s/o Sashidhar Narayan Chowdhury is said to have been commissioned into the Indian Army from Bihar.
Speaking to media persons soon after his detention, Ajay Chowdhury claimed that he obliged invitation by a nephew of a senior Manipur police officer to visit Moreh.
The Colonel also said that he had no idea the bags contained drugs.
It is said that Pseudoephedrine Hydrocloride drugs are smuggled into Myanmar and beyond where it is used in the manufacture of heroin as well as in other psychotropic drugs.
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CoNE appeals for re-establishment of OST at Senapati

IMPHAL, February 13:  The Community Network for Empowerment (CoNE), a state level network of community based organization of people who use drugs in Manipur has voiced its discontent with the sudden closure of the Opioid Substitution Therapy (OST) program at the Senapati District hospital during a press conference today at the Karong Community Hall.
CoNE’s assertion was that the availability and improvement of the life of injecting drug users following the service of OST has been affected after the drug therapy program was shut down at the district headquarter abruptly on January 20, 2013 without any alternate arrangement and prior notice, leaving  79 program beneficiaries unattended in the middle of the treatment process.
Speaking at the press conference, President of CoNE, Nolinikanta, said that the Senapati district OST centre was the first to be set up in Manipur after the Chief Minister announced that 19 OST centres would be set up to rehabilitate drug users on World Aids Days, 2011.
He continued that soon after the closure of the program at Senapati, CoNE and another community based orgsanization -Senapati District Users’ Community Organization had submitted a report to the MACS public distributor, but there has been no reply till date.
The civil society groups then contacted the concerned authority of the district regarding the issue but they were told that program benefeciaries could get OST at Imphal centres.
However, he stressed that travelling to the state capital everyday for the sublingual supplement from far flung villages is not only inconvenient but also not feasible for the injection drug users who are not stable to even travel at the first place. Then there is the travel expense which is also a burden to the families of the clients, he added.
He further said that the society who mandates a quality treatment for the rehabilitation of drug users and to prevent HIV virus and other blood transfusion diseases had carried on the treatment smoothly although it had insufficient staff members.
He said that according to the guidelines of National Aids Control Organization, there should be a doctor, two nurses, a counselor and a data operator for running the program.
He added that stopping the treatment for the drug abusers who are willing to get back to normal life is a violation against human rights and the right to public health. It would also be a waste to all the hard work they have contributed for the betterment of the injection drug users, he said.
“After getting the treatment, my life has gone through a lot of positive change but ever since I have stopped OST, I am tempted to get back to my old ways of injecting again,” a drug user was quoted as saying at the conference.
CoNE in collaboration with the community based organization, SDUCO has further appealed to the Manipur State AIDS Control Society to re-establish OST within February with adequate staff according to the guidelines of NACO. If no action is taken, the civil society would submit a memorandum to the highest authority available with the help of different civil societies of the area.
OST is a therapy process where in injecting drug users are given oral doses of buprenorphine which is ingested by placing underneath the tongue. The therapy is given in proportionate doses according to the dose of injecting drugs with the dosage amount slowly being decreased. The therapy is credited with helping injecting drug users give up injecting while addressing bodily withdrawal symptoms.
http://www.ifp.co.in/nws-12451-cone-appeals-for-reestablishment-of-ost-at-senapati/
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Consultative meet on HCV

IMPHAL, Feb 10: A consultative meet for media persons on hepatitis C virus (HCV) was held today at Manipur Press Club here under the aegis of the Community Network for Empowerment (CNE).
Speaking at the meeting, CNE president RK Nalinikanta said that the programme was being organised to bring up the issue of HCV as a public issue. Citing some studies done in Manipur, Nalinikanta said that the rate of co-infection by both HIV and HCV among injecting drug users is as high as 75 per cent.
Usually, people living with HCV for a long time develop liver problems and ultimately got infected by liver cirrhosis.
Manipur Network of Positive People president L Deepak said that it is best for HCV positive people to start treatment when their health condition has not started deteriorating. For people co-infected by HIV and HCV, they should undergo treatment for one year. As for people infected by HCV alo-ne, six months’ treatment is enough, he said.
But treatment for HCV infection costs Rs three lakhs to five lakhs. This is a huge burden to poor HCV infected persons and their families.
“I was confirmed HIV positive in 1994 and then in 2006 I became HCV positive but I could not go for treatment in spite of doctor’s advice that I cannot live long without going for the treatment”.
“It was much later I went for HCV treatment with the help of my family and friends”, Deepak said.
During this one year of treatment, HCV positive people feel reduced eye sight, drying muscles, loss of appetite, nausea, fever, exhaustion etc, and most of the HCV drugs cause side effects.
Hepatitis B has vaccine but there is no vaccine for hepatitis C.
There is a list of drugs/medicines identified by the Government of India but HCV drug is not included in the list.
Whereas those medicines included in the list are priced at affordable rates besides keeping a close watch on their qualities, HCV drug is very costly being a patented medicine.
Manipur University Associate Professor Chinglen Maisnam presented a paper on socio-economic background of people living with HCV while JNIMS nodal officer Dr K Priyokumar spoke on the topic ‘Treatment of HCV in Manipur’.
AMWJU president A Mobi assured that media would extend all possible assistance in tackling the issue of
HCV.
 http://www.thesangaiexpress.com/tseitm-23617-consultative-meet-on-hcv/
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Cases Presented At 19th Annual International AIDS Conference Two more men with HIV now virus-free. Is this a cure?

Maggie Fox (NBC News)
WASHINGTON, Jan 27 : Two men unlucky enough to get both HIV and cancer have been seemingly cleared of the virus, raising hope that science may yet find a way to cure for the infection that causes AIDS, 30 years into the epidemic.
The researchers are cautious in declaring the two men cured, but more than two years after receiving bone marrow transplants, HIV can’t be detected anywhere in their bodies. These two new cases are reminiscent of the so-called “Berlin patient,” the only person known to have been cured of infection from the human immunodeficiency virus.
These two cases, presented as a ‘late-breaker’ finding on Thursday at the 19th annual International AIDS Conference in Washington, DC, are among the reasons that scientists have been speaking so openly at the event about their hopes of finding a cure.
“Everyone knows about this ‘Berlin patient’. We wanted to see if a simpler treatment would do the same thing”, said Dr Daniel Kuritzkes of Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, who oversaw the study. The widely publicized patient, Timothy Brown, was treated for leukemia with a bone marrow transplant that happened to come from a donor with a genetic mutation that makes immune cells resist HIV infection. The transplant replaced his own infected cells with healthy, AIDS-resistant cells. He is HIV-free five years later.
AIDS patients are susceptible to cancers, but they usually stop taking HIV drugs before receiving cancer treatment. “That allows the virus to come back and it infects their donor cells,” Kuritzkes said.
About 34 million people are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, globally; 25 million have died from it. While there’s no vaccine, cocktails of powerful antiviral drugs called antiretroviral therapy (ART) can keep the virus suppressed and keep patients healthy. No matter how long patients take ART, however, they are never cured. The virus lurks in the body and comes back if the drugs are stopped. Scientists want to flush out these so-called reservoirs and find a way to kill the virus for good.
Brown, and now these two other men, offer some real hope.
Dr Timothy Henrich and colleagues at Brigham and Women’s Hospital launched a search about a year ago for HIV patients with leukemia or lymphoma who had received bone marrow stem cell transplants. Bone marrow is the body’s source of immune system cells that HIV infects and it’s a likely place to look for HIV’s reservoirs.
“If you took an HIV patient getting treated for various cancers, you can check the effect on the viral reservoirs of various cancer treatments,” Kuritzkes, who works with Henrich, said. They found the two patients by asking colleagues at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston which, like Brigham and Women’s, is associated with Harvard Medical School.
Both men had endured multiple rounds of treatment for lymphoma, both had stem cell treatments and both had stayed on their HIV drugs throughout. “They went through the transplants on therapy,” Kuritzkes said.
“We found that immediately before the transplant and after the transplant, HIV DNA was in the cells. As the patients’ cells were replaced by the donor cells, the HIV DNA disappeared,” Kuritzkes said. The donor cells, it appears, killed off and replaced the infected cells. And the HIV drugs protected the donor cells while they did it.
One patient is HIV-free two years later, and the other is seemingly uninfected three-and-a-half years later.
“They still have no detectable HIV DNA in their T-cells,” Kuritzkes said. In fact, doctors can’t find any trace of HIV in their bodies — not in their blood plasma, not when they grow cells in the lab dishes, not by the most sensitive tests.
Can the patients be told they are cured?
“We’re being very careful not to do that,” Kuritzkes said.
For now, both men are staying on AIDS drugs until they can be carefully taken off under experimental conditions. “We are not saying, “You are like the Berlin patient’.”
Although the men are HIV-free, Kuritzkes says it’s been an arduous experience for them. After being diagnosed HIV-positive, one underwent rounds of chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease, a kind of lymphoma, before receiving the final bone marrow transplant, called an allogeneic bone marrow transplant. It is not an easy treatment to endure.
The men, one from Boston and one from New York, were not initially told their HIV had seemingly disappeared. When researchers realized news media would cover the report, they were informed.
Neither man is being identified for privacy reasons but one is in his 50s and has been infected since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. The other man, in his 20s, was infected at birth.
The findings may not apply to all patients. Both men were a little unusual in that they had a genetic mutation that can make immune cells resistant to infection by HIV. Their new immune cells, however, which came from the donors, are fully susceptible to the virus.
“We’re never really going to be able to do bone marrow transplants in the millions of patients who are infected,” Kuritzkes said. “But if you can stimulate the virus and eliminate those cells, we can protect the remaining cells from being infected.”
Separately, two other studies presented at the conference have scientists optimistic about a cure. In one, a cancer drug called vorinostat flushed out latent HIV from a handful of patients, offering the possibility of killing these latent reservoirs. In another, about 15 French patients who got HIV drugs very early after their infections were able to stop treatment and don’t show any symptoms years later, even though they are still infected.
Organizers of the conference say the findings provide an argument for treating patients early. “(These studies) give us reason for enthusiasm, that ultimately we are going to get to where we needed to go, which is to cure people with HIV infection,” said Dr. Steven Deeks, an HIV expert at the University of California, San Francisco.
28-Jan-2013 / 01:40 AM / Agencies / 0 Comment

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Meet moots framing of State policy on reproductive health rights

IMPHAL, Jan 28: The need to formulate an exclusive State policy and plan on sexual reproductive health rights so as to spread awareness among the youth was mooted during a Coalition Meeting held today at Hotel Nirmala here.
Representatives of CSOs who participated in the technical CSO discussion programme on Action Project implemented by Social Awareness Service Organisation; AASHA, Imphal East and FDDUO, Imphal West under India HIV/AIDS Alliance, strongly felt the necessity to sensitise the youth on sexual reproductive health rights.
The Action Project, which has been aimed to spread awareness on sexual reproductive health rights among the youth, was for the first time implemented in the State in 2010.
The primary target group under the Action Project was the sex workers, IDUs and MSMs. The secondary target group included policy makers, health service providers, teachers, parents and religious leaders.
The project has been implemented in Imphal East and Imphal West districts, each divided into four segments. The three-year project ends January this year.
Around 37,000 youths were sensitised on sexual reproductive health rights under the project using various forms of media.
Addressing the meeting, general secretary of Manipur Network of Positive People, Salam Uditta said ignorance of the youths on sexual reproductive health rights led to occurrence of various sexual crimes among the youth in the State. Various family problems erupted due to underage marriage and premarital sexual relation, Udita said while adding parents also need to be aware of the sexual reproductive health rights.
Udita further maintained that the Govt and its various departments should consider framing a State policy on the matter in order to spread awareness among the youth of the State.
General secretary of SASO, Sashikumar said awareness on sexual reproductive health rights has been reached to several youths under Action Project. He said the implementation of the programme would not be a success unless a follow-up programme in the form of framing state policy on sexual reproductive health rights is taken up by the Government.
State Nodal Officer of NRHM, Dr Ibemcha said that adolescent clinic has been started at CHCs and selected PHCs under NRHM in the State. However, due to lack of awareness, only few visited the clinic, Dr Ibemcha said while adding that adolescents could consult their problems relating to sexual reproductive health rights at the clinics.
Sharing experience, Project Manager of Action Project conveyed the need to include sex education in school curricula.

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