High-risk behavior spurs RI's AIDS rate

High-risk behavior spurs RI's AIDS rate

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

As the globe commemorates World AIDS Day on Dec. 1,
Indonesia's response continues to remain dangerously slow while
millions of its people continue to obliviously engage in high
risk behavior.

The United Nations' new report on AIDS also revealed that
injecting drug use "is the major driver" of the spread of
HIV/AIDS here. Meanwhile condom use remains low, despite various
campaigns, even in the commercial sex trade, where "it is
estimated that fewer than 10 percent of the between 7 million and
10 million Indonesian men who avail of the services of sex
workers use condoms consistently," read the UNAIDS report,
released ahead of World AIDS Day.

Haikin Rachmat, director of Communicable Diseases Control at
the Ministry of Health, said Sunday that according to the
ministry's behavior survey, "80 percent of high risk groups know
about the transmission mode of HIV but less than 10 percent of
them use a condom."

Experts have urged the need to scale up programs to overcome
HIV/AIDS in a bid to check the potentially rapid spread of the
virus, experts here say.

Zubairi Djoerban, chairman of the Indonesian AIDS Society,
said a shortcut measure would be for all stakeholders "to learn
success stories from other institutions (in other countries) so
that they can scale up existing programs without having to start
from scratch."

The experts, along with Amaya Maw-Naing, medical officer at
World Health Organization's Representative Office for Indonesia,
agreed that government, non-governmental organizations (NGOs),
people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA), the private sector and
donors needed to strengthen and integrate their efforts in
tackling the epidemic.

Agence-France Presse on Sunday quoted epidemiologist Elizabeth
Pisani as saying that Indonesia has one of the fastest growing
epidemics in the world today.

Among female sex workers, she said the rate of HIV infection
is low compared to other Asian countries but is growing extremely
rapidly. The rate is eight percent in Riau, home to a red light
district popular among some Singaporeans, and also eight percent
in Merauke in Papua province. Sorong, also in Papua, has the
country's highest level of infection at 16 percent according to
government data, said Pisani of Aksi Stop AIDS, an AIDS
prevention and care group, a project of the above ministry and
USAID.

The figures were an increase from zero in the last three or
four years, Pisani said.

The Ministry of Health recorded that from 1987 until Sept. 30
this year, there were 3,924 PLWHA across the country. This figure
comprises 2,685 HIV cases and 1,239 AIDS cases, while 428 of them
have died. However, according to an official estimation from
UNAIDS, Indonesia is home to 130,000 PLWHA.

From July to September this year, the ministry recorded 277
new cases, most of them reported from Papua (105 HIV and 62
AIDS), East Java (33 AIDS), Yogyakarta (19 HIV and 5 AIDS), and
North Sumatra (2 HIV and 13 AIDS). About 66 AIDS cases are among
the 20-29-year-old age group while 46 AIDS cases are in the 30-39
age bracket. Most of the transmission modes involve injecting
drug use and sexual encounters.

"All partners need to strengthen their efforts. Prevention,
care, treatment and support programs must go together. None is
over the other," said Maw-Naing.

Zubairi pointed out that the country still lacked Voluntary,
Counseling and Test (VCT) services and only a few pregnant women
received information and treatment that could help them avoid
transmitting HIV to their children.

"Currently, we only have 10 such centers in the country. We
can learn from Africa which has more than 100 VCT centers, or
from America, which obliges gynecologists to inform pregnant
women about the risk of transmitting the virus to their babies."

Zubairi said that teenagers, especially those who are sexually
active, have not received adequate information about the
prevention of Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Acquired Immune
Deficiency Syndrome. There are only some schools in Greater
Jakarta that pass on such information while the government has
yet to insert make any provision for it in school curricula.