By TCN News,
Guwahati: Doctor Syed Iftikar Ahmed, chairman of Guwahati-based NGO ‘AIDS Prevention Society’ and a member of Lions Club of Narangi has been invited to attend the Lions Day programme at the United Nations’ headquarters in New York.
Ahmed, who designed and implemented a flagship project in India for preventing the children from acquiring HIV from their infected mothers, is scheduled to present the outcome of the project at the UN meeting.
Syed Iftikar Ahmed
The theme of Lion International programme, to be held in the first week of March 2015, is ‘Children in Need’ and it will be addressed by key UN speakers dwelling deeper into the subject matter.
The European Commission in Brussels has already honoured the innovative scientific research project in an international competitive bid.
The project, implemented from 2001 to 2007 involved screening of 6,000 antenatal mothers, who were administered anti-retroviral drug ‘Nevirapine’ and it showed encouraging outcomes with drastically reduced rates of infection from the mother to the newborn baby.
The entire process was monitored by the European Commission experts and was evaluated by the scientists belonging to Indian Council for Medical Research.
President of the North East India Harm Reduction Network (NEIHRN), Ahmed had earlier attended the UN General Assembly’s a special session on HIV/AIDS in 2008, where he successfully raised the serious issue of Hepatitis C & HIV co-infection that has taken many lives including young people in northeast India.