HIV-AIDS spreads along Asia's drug routes

HIV-AIDS spreads along Asia's drug routes

Michael Perry, Reuters, Sydney

Increasing drug use in Asia is accelerating the spread of HIV- AIDS along drug trafficking routes from the so-called Golden Triangle to nations like Indonesia and governments are doing too little to combat it, a report says.

The report on 22 Asian countries, as well as Hong Kong and Macau, said Asian governments were working against the sexual transmission of HIV but they were not doing enough to prevent the virus spreading among injecting drug users.

"Without such action, Asia will continue to be home to what threatens to be amongst the worst regional AIDS epidemics on Earth," said the report by The Centre For Harm Reduction, one of Asia's foremost health and medical research bodies.

Seven million people in Asia live with AIDS or HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), which causes the disease.

The report said Asia had few HIV-AIDS prevention programs for drug users, such as needle exchanges, and that many drug users shared needles cleaned simply by cold water, not the recommended boiling water or bleach.

"Drug use has become one of the major accelerants of the HIV epidemic in the Asian region," said the report available at the center's Web site (http://www.chr.asn.au). The center first issued an Asian HIV-AIDS report in 1997.

"Populations of drug users develop rapidly along trafficking routes, creating new drug markets and HIV threat in host countries," it said.

The report found injecting drug users made up 70 percent of HIV infections in China in 2001 compared with 66 percent in 1997.

It said specific HIV subtypes now appearing in previously HIV- free areas of China could be linked to specific drug trafficking routes to the "Golden Triangle", the so-called heroin producing region of Myanmar, Laos and Thailand.

China puts its number of confirmed HIV-AIDS cases at 28,133, but health officials say the real figures could be above 600,000.

The United Nations says China could have 10 million HIV-AIDS sufferers by 2010 unless it acts decisively.

The Australian report found 75 percent of those infected with HIV in Iran were injecting drug users, 65 percent in Vietnam and 54 percent in Thailand.

It said the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macau, Pakistan, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Bangladesh also faced potential HIV epidemics among injecting drug users.

The report noted an increasing number of Asian women injecting drugs, particularly in the sex industry.

"In some parts of Asia, an increasing crossover is being observed between injecting drug use and commercial sex work, with all the implications this has for further rapid spread of HIV infection from injecting drug users," it said.

The report was critical of Asian governments increased incarceration of drug users, which it said increases the risk of transmitting HIV.

"In many countries in the region, incarceration of drug users ...not only continues but it is being increased," it said.

"This is despite the fact that there is mounting evidence from the Asian region...that incarceration not only does not help drug dependent people cease drug use but hugely increases risk for HIV transmission among and from these populations."