HIV/AIDS in Asia
'
"We thought AIDS didn't strike people like us," says V.G. 71,
a
Mumbai based businessman. Two years ago, he and his wife watched
helplessly as their son Jayesh, 39, died. Six months later,
Pooja their
28-year old daughter-in-law also succumbed
to AIDS.'_
Farah Baria et.al, India Today March 1997.
HIV was a latecomer to
Asia and the Pacific, but its spread has been swift. Until the late 1980's,
no country experienced a major epidemic. By 1992, however, a number of
countries were facing increasing numbers of infections, led in large part by
the commercial sex industry. Across the continent as a whole, UNAIDS/WHO
estimate that 6.5 million men, women and children were living with HIV at
the end of 1999, over five times as many as have already died of AIDS in the
region.
Southeast Asia and South
Asia have been most affected. India is experiencing rapid and extensive
spread of HIV: with an estimated 4 million people infected, it is now the
country with the largest number of HIV-positive individuals. This is
particularly worrisome since India is home to a population of over 900
million. As a single nation it has more people than the continents of Africa,
Australia and Latin America combined. In India, promiscuity is the single
most important way the epidemic spreads: both married and unmarried men
visit sex workers, one out of five people have extramarital relations and
premarital sex nowadays is very common.
Another giant in the
region dominating the assessment of HIV in Asia is China.In China, HIV infection rates remained relatively low, with almost
half a million people in a population of over a billion estimated to be HIV
positive. The bulk of new infections were concentrated in drug injectors (IDU's).
Worryingly, injecting drug use seems to be on the rise. The practice is
becoming common in areas where it was previously little recorded. Thailand,
Malaysia, Vietnam and also some areas of India have substantial rates of
infection among IDU's. In Manipur, India, infection rates now exceed 70%; in
Bhurma (Myanmar) nearly two-thirds of IDU's have HIV.
Infection rates remain
relatively low in Viet Nam, but they are on the rise. The HIV surveillance
system indicates that HIV prevalence in pregnant women increased more than
ten folds between 1994 and 1998. A study tracking over 40,000 pregnancies in
the badly affected northern Thai province Chiang Rai showed that the
proportion who were HIV-infected fell from a peak of 6.4% in 1994 to 4.6% in
1997. Encouragingly, the fall in HIV prevalence was especially steep in
younger women.
From
1997 until 1999 the number of AIDS cases in Southeast Asia has increased by
40%. In India teenagers and young men form a third of HIV cases, prostitutes
being the main source of infection. Few people go in for blood tests unless
the symptoms begin to show. So in many cases people who are infected get
married and pass on the virus to their wives and children unknowingly.
Estimations say that one out of ten HIV-positive patients in India is a
housewife. The male:female ratio of HIV infections has been projected to be
40:60 by 2005. The majority of the infected women will be between 20-25.
This age factor makes AIDS uniquely threatening to children. In 2000 there
are between 120,000- 150,000 HIV/AIDS orphans in Thailand, where as in 1996
the number was only between 10,000 - 15,000.
