Missionaries of Charity their families every five years but do not take annual holidays. Lay Catholics and non-Catholics constitute the Co-Workers of Mother Teresa, the Sick and Suffering Co-Workers, and the Lay Missionaries of Charity. The first home of the Missionaries of Charity in the United States was established in the South Bronx, New York. In the USA, the Missionaries of Charity are affiliated with the Council of Major Superiors of Women Religious, a body of female religious, representing 20% of American nuns. They are identified by the wearing of religious habits, and loyalty to church teaching. By 1996, the organisation was operating
Sellappan Nirmala Medical Research, which told the prime minister Rajiv Gandhi and Tamil Nadu health minister H. V. Hande. HIV subsequently became an epidemic in the country. Nirmala submitted her dissertation, "Surveillance for Aids in Tamil Nadu", in March 1987 and later joined the King Institute of Preventive Medicine and Research in Chennai. She retired in 2010. Sellappan Nirmala Nirmala Sellappan (born 1952 or 1953) is an Indian doctor who discovered the first case of HIV in India in 1986. In 1985, aged 32, she was working as a microbiology student in Chennai (Madras) and for her dissertation, began collecting blood samples