While Thailand is a success story in the battle against HIV/AIDS, Myanmar and Vietnam threaten to emerge as new regional hotbeds of a disease which has killed more than 25 million people, experts said on Wednesday.
The failure to work hard enough on prevention and a dearth of access to treatment were feeding growing HIV/AIDS epidemics in Vietnam and Myanmar, UN officials said at a regional launch of a UNAIDS report on the disease.
Even Thailand, a former HIV/AIDS hot spot which has more than halved the number of new infections over the past decade, could suffer a resurgence if public vigilance against the disease waned.
“Thailand in a way has become a captive of its success,” said Patrick Brenny, the country coordinator UNAIDS, the UN agency devoted to fighting a pandemic first recognised by doctors 25 years ago.
“We don’t have the magic cure yet. Our efforts are not a sprint. They’re a marathon,” he told reporters and aid workers. “There is still more that needs to be done.”
Thailand’s neighbours, for their part, face problems battling the disease, particularly as a result of the overlapping risks of injecting drug use and unprotected sex, the report said.
According to the 630-page report based on data gathered from 126 countries since December 2005, Vietnam has seen HIV spread to all of its 59 provinces and cities. Out of a population of 84 million, 260,000 people live with HIV.
In Myanmar -- a military-ruled country where foreign aid groups are heavily constrained -- 360,000 men, women and children had HIV in 2005 and the proportion of adults with HIV was 1.3 percent versus 0.3 percent in Vietnam.
“In Myanmar, we’re seeing small steps of progress,” said David Bridger of UNAIDS, singling out lower infection rates among pregnant women.
But “Myanmar still has a very serious epidemic, and one of the most serious in the region.”
Asia the focus
A major focal point in the fight against HIV/AIDS has been Asia, where some 8.3 million people were HIV-positive at the end of 2005 -- two-thirds of them in India, where the prevalence rate is 0.9 percent.
In China, injecting drug users account for almost half the 650,000 people with HIV, with the proportion of HIV infections in women up to 39 percent of reported cases in 2004 from 25 percent just two years earlier.
Indeed, women all over Asia are seen as increasingly vulnerable due to straying partners and a robust sex trade.
“When we are talking about gender inequality, the low status of women remains a driver of the disease’s spread,” said Frika Chia of the Asia Pacific Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS.
The disease had yet to have a serious impact on Bangladesh, the Philippines, Indonesia and Pakistan, but prevention methods needed to be improved to keep the disease from burning out of control, the report said.
Many of the groups most at risk -- prostitutes, migrants, homosexuals and drug users -- were not getting the attention they needed, UNAIDS said. For example, only 9 percent of men who have sex with men received any HIV prevention service last year.
That was keeping much-needed discussion of the disease under wraps and discouraging many from getting tested. In Thailand alone, 60 percent of those infected with HIV/AIDS were unaware they had it, Thai health officials estimate.
“Stigma and discrimination in Thailand continue to be a major hurdle,” Brenny said.