Asians told to use condoms or face
HIV explosion
By Tan Ee Lyn
July 11, 2004
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Condom use is still abysmally
low in many parts of Asia and the region could suffer an explosion in
HIV infections in the next few years if governments fail to push the
"safe sex" message home, experts say.
"We have some of the highest levels of risky
behaviour," Tim Brown, director of UNAIDS collaborating centre at
the East-West Centre, told a news conference on the sidelines of the
15th International AIDS conference on Sunday.
"There is a very real potential that in two
to three years we'll see very rapid growth in HIV prevalence," he
said as 17,000 delegates met in Bangkok for the conference, many of them
worried a lot of countries were not taking prevention seriously enough.
China and Bangladesh were particular trouble
spots, with condom use at only between 10 to 20 percent.
"Those levels of condom use are not going to
help prevent HIV infection," Brown said.
China has an estimated one to 1.5 million HIV/AIDS
cases and is ranked alongside India and Russia as countries most at risk
from AIDS outside Africa.
The United Nations says China could have 10
million victims by 2010 if it fails to take the threat seriously.
Just this week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao
stressed the importance of HIV prevention and control, but experts and
activists on the ground say ignorance of the disease is just
overwhelming.
Many Chinese doctors are too afraid to treat AIDS
patients, and many victims prefer to suffer in silence rather than seek
treatment because of the strong public stigma attached to the disease.
A World Bank official called on governments all
over the world to push for 100 percent condom use programmes.
Mead Over, lead economist of the World Bank's
Development Research Group, said activists and governments needed to
zero in on places where people look for casual sex and to propagate the
message of safe sex.
"We need to look at every hotspot and make
sure every one of them is covered," Over said.
Experts at the conference held up Thailand and
Cambodia as examples of how rigorous programmes have managed to slow the
spread of the disease.
But they said even in those countries, complacency
was beginning to set in with the availability of anti-retroviral drugs.
Owing partly to its large sex industry, a magnet
for foreign visitors, health experts identified Thailand in the 1980s as
among countries that would suffer an HIV/AIDS epidemic.
But the country pumped in enormous amounts of
resources to promote condom use not only in its sex industry but in its
wider community, which dramatically reduced infection rates.
As awareness of the disease grew, condom use not
only rose to between 85-90 percent, but the number of Thai men who
visited sex workers was slashed by half in 1995 from just five years
earlier, Brown said.
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