A 28-year-old HIV-infected woman delivered her baby boy on the roadside in Suryapet, which is 130 km from Hyderabad, in Andhra Pradesh's Nalgonda district, as she left the hospital yesterday.

She was lucky enough to receive the assistance of the women working at a nearby site.

These women were farm labourers working at a construction site and they had infected and bruised hands. The delivery was too dangerous as the pregnant woman was already HIV-infected and the woman assisting her was not wearing gloves.

The woman had visited one of the Government hospitals for her delivery on Sunday. The doctors sent her to the Observation Room as they realised that she was an HIV patient.

They avoided handling her case. This attitude of the doctors prompted the woman to seek help somewhere else. She was also afraid of her HIV infection’s revelation to the staff and her fellow villagers.

After the revelation of the case, the Government hospital has sacked those two doctors who had mistreated her, said Andhra Pradesh State Aids Control Society Director V. Chandravadan.

Ideally, the baby should have been given a drug called nevirapine in order to avoid the transmission of the disease to the baby. The mother and the baby have now been taken to the community health centre for HIV patients and the baby has received the drug there.