When Nirmala opened the box of serum samples which had gone through testing, she was astonished to find six of them had turned yellow. The 32 year old microbiology student of a Medical college in Chennai couldn’t believe her own eyes. The serum colour change meant confirmation of HIV in blood. That day in February 1986 India woke up to its first AIDs case and Nirmala’s dedicated efforts were behind this important discovery in Indian medical history.
Thirty one years have passed since the discovery by Nirmala and she still remains an unsung hero despite her path-breaking work. As a microbiology student, in December 1985, Nirmala was looking for a topic for her thesis. It was her professor Dr. Suniti Solomon who asked her to take up AIDs tracking. Finding AIDs affected people had begun in the US three years earlier.
The idea of ‘AIDs in India’ was scoffed at during that time because people tended to believe that AIDs was exclusively a disease of the western world where, they thought, free sex and homosexuality were rampant. They also believed that AIds won’t reach India where all are heterosexual, monogamous and God-fearing, and by the time when Indians engage in debauchery and get infected western world would have come up with a cure for the disease.
There hadn’t been any positive results from blood samples collected from people in Mumbai and Chennai city, Nirmala’s study area, was comparatively less promiscuous as there wasn’t any place marked as red-light district which normally functioned as a hub for transmitting the dreaded disease. So, Nirmala wasn’t much enthusiastic about pursuing her thesis. She told her professor that the result would be negative. But Dr. Solomon persuaded her to go ahead.
Nirmala even didn’t know where to find her subjects. Somehow she managed to befriend some sex-workers undergoing treatment for sexually transmitted diseases in Madras General Hospital. Through them she was able to find sex-workers remanded by authorities in ‘V home’ or vigilance home. Nirmala collected 80 blood samples from the women of ‘V home’ and the women didn’t know what they were being tested for. “Even if I had told them they wouldn’t have understood what AIDs was”, says Nirmala. She separated the serum from the blood samples in a makeshift laboratory offered by Dr. Solomon and took home the samples to keep in the refrigerator since there wasn’t any storage facility in the improvised lab.
The blood samples were taken to Christian Medical College (CMC) in Vellore, 200km away from Chennai as there was no Elisa testing (a test to ascertain HIV’s presence in the blood) facility in Chennai. Six samples out of 80 turned out to be HIV positive and it was utter disbelief that followed the discovery. Nirmala went back to ‘V home’ and collected blood samples from those six women again. The samples were flown to the US where a Western Blot test established that the deadly HIV virus had really arrived in India. The news was passed on to the Indian Council for Medical Research. The ICMR informed the then Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi and then Tamil Nadu state health minister HV Hande. Nirmala and Dr. Solomon were seated in the visitors’ gallery of TN assembly as Hande announced the appalling news in the state assembly in May 1986.
The discovery prompted massive screening and prevention programmes. Over the years, HIV-AIDs turned into an epidemic in India before brought being under control in 2006. Nirmala went back to her studies. Her thesis ‘Surveillance for Aids in Tamil Nadu’ was submitted in March 1987. After completing her course she joined the King Institute of Preventive Medicine in Chennai and retired in 2010. Except for a few press reports at the time of the discovery, Nirmala’s contribution to the detection of India’s first AIDs cases was forgotten. When asked about this she says she is content with the opportunity she got and is happy that she had done something for the society.
