Suniti Solomon

Abstract

Microbiologist who played a key role in alerting India to the threat from the HIV/AIDS epidemic. She was born on Oct 14, 1939, in Chennai, India, and died from pancreatic cancer on July 28, 2015, in Chennai, aged 76 years. Suniti Solomon was a small, softly spoken woman who succeeded against the odds in making her voice heard throughout India. In 1986, she and her team at Madras Medical College in Chennai, India, documented for the first time the extent of HIV infection in the country. She tested a group of sex workers and found six of them were HIV positive. The implication was that India faced an HIV epidemic on an undreamt of scale. The Indian Government was forced to sit up and take notice. Many experts had predicted the disease would cause devastation in the subcontinent, with its tens of thousands of sex workers, brothels, and truck drivers, as well as millions of seasonal workers living far from home. Yet today, although India has the third highest number of people living with HIV because of its vast population, the infection rate has remained below about 0·3%. Colleagues say that is due, at least in part, to Solomon. One of the first patients Solomon diagnosed with HIV was a 13-year-old girl who had been forced into sex work. The prevailing view among some people at that time was that individuals infected with HIV had done something “immoral”. But this patient was obviously different. “That case changed me”, Solomon later said. Solomon established one of India's first voluntary HIV counselling and testing facilities in 1993, the Y R Gaitonde Centre for AIDS Research and Education (now YRG CARE) in Chennai. Since then, the centre has cared for more than 20 000 patients with HIV from across south India and currently treats 100 outpatients a day with 15 000 patients on regular follow-up. The non-profit organisation also educates other doctors about HIV and works to reduce the stigma about people living with HIV. Nagalingeswaran Kumarasamy, Chief Medical Officer at YRG CARE since 1994 and a former student of Solomon's, said: “She was one of the first to talk openly about HIV in India. Her work and the setting up of YRG CARE were significant factors in slowing the epidemic. But she also did a lot to educate other doctors that HIV was not a fatal disease and could be treated.” Rana Chakraborty, Professor of Pediatrics in the Division of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, GA, USA, met Solomon at a conference she organised in Chennai in 1997, together with his colleague James Oleske, Professor of Pediatrics at Rutgers University New Jersey Medical School in Newark, NJ, USA. “We were struck by how daunting the job in India seemed and how impressive Dr Solomon was in the strength and energy she brought to the task. In the late 1980s, people in India refused to believe what she was saying. She encountered huge opposition. It was remarkable for an Indian woman to break through in the way she did on the strength of her personality. She was ahead of her time”, Chakraborty said. One of eight siblings, Solomon was the only daughter of the Gaitonde family who were prominent in the leather trade in Chennai. She qualified in medicine at Madras Medical College where she met her husband, Victor Solomon, a cardiac surgeon. For almost a decade she trained in pathology in the UK, the USA, and Australia, before returning to Chennai in 1973. She did her doctorate in microbiology and in the 1980s, after reading about HIV and AIDS, decided to track the virus in India. That decision set the course of her life. In 2009, the Ministry of Science and Technology conferred the National Award for Women Bioscientists on Solomon. She was actively involved in the work of the YRG Centre and in HIV education to the end of her life, hosting a major conference in Chennai in January, 2014. Outside her work, she enjoyed reading and the company of her two golden retrievers. She died from pancreatic cancer and was predeceased by her husband, who died in 2006, but is survived by her son, Sunil Solomon, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins University in the USA. Solomon's commitment to her patients and her country is what is remembered by colleagues. “She was such a passionate person. In the past many doctors from India went abroad for training, found better jobs and stayed. But she felt her services were more needed in India”, said Kumarasamy.