Condoms Get Chewing Tobacco, Betel Nut Treatment in India

Source from:  Tue Jul 17, NEW DELHI (AFP) news.yahoo.com 07/18/2007

India's largest contraceptive-maker is flooding the market with condoms flavoured with a popular mixture of betel nut and tobacco known as paan in the latest initiative in the fight against AIDS. State-owned Hindustan Latex Ltd. said it has so far supplied eight million packets of condoms laced with the pungent and bitter mixture to their main market -- sex workers in western India. "We are giving the paan-flavored condoms... it is hugely favored by the sex workers," company spokesman S. Jayaraj told AFP Tuesday. An aid group supported by the Bill and Belinda Gates Foundation, which is heavily involved in the fight against AIDS in India, told the firm that sex workers preferred it to more usual flavourings such as banana and strawberry. "These condoms are free for distribution as the add-on will help sex workers persuade their clients to use them as a protection against HIV/AIDS," Jayaraj said from the firm's headquarters in the southern city of Thiruvananthapuram. Varieties of betel nut, tobacco jaggery and sweet and bitter pastes are mixed in a concoction called paan sold at street-side stalls across South Asia. Aficionados chew the mixture wrapped in a leaf and then spit the red saliva onto the sidewalks or buildings that are adorned with the tell-tale stains. "We are also thinking of commercial production of these condoms but that's for the future," he said. "India's condom market is not ballooning despite our efforts, and that's why we want to sharpen interest with this product because usage is only five percent in our billion-plus nation," he said. India said earlier this month that the number of its people living with HIV-AIDS stands at two million to 3.1 million, sharply lower than earlier estimates, but vowed to spend billions to check a wider epidemic. Previous estimates from India's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) had put the HIV caseload at 5.2 million, while UNAIDS in 2006 estimated 5.7 million cases which would have been the highest in the world. Enditem