Jury still out on impact of Asian crisis on AIDS

Jury still out on impact of Asian crisis on AIDS

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters): Asia's economic crisis has hastened the spread of AIDS in Indonesia, but Thailand's social programs have helped prevent an extension of the fatal disease in that country, a World Bank official said on Monday.

Martha Ainsworth, senior economist in the World Bank's Development Resources Group, said the two countries' divergent experiences indicated it was not clear whether more Asians had become infected with the AIDS virus since the crisis.

"I think the jury is still out on that," she told Reuters on the sidelines of the 5th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific, being held in Malaysia's capital.

"You have to remember all the East Asian countries had the AIDS problem before the crisis," she said, adding that it would take at least two years before a trend could emerge.

Ainsworth said the economic downturn and political upheaval had severely affected Indonesia. "Indonesia was one of the countries where there was definitely a decline in social spending, and the impact was among the worst," she said.

"Add to that the political upheavals that happened and it had an early epidemic. What happened was all that upheaval changed behavior in such a way that HIV was spread," she said, referring to the human immunodeficiency virus that can lead to Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.

She did not have figures on the number of Indonesians infected with the HIV virus or with full-blown AIDS.

Ainsworth said the economic crisis led to large income shocks and governments lost revenues, spurring demand for social programs to cushion the adverse impact.

Ainsworth said studies showed that in Thailand, the incidence of AIDS in almost all groups except intravenous drug users had declined after the onset of the regional economic crisis in mid- 1997.

"There was an enormous coping by the government and by the households to try to smoothen their consumption and try to at least guarantee expansion of social programs to help people in the crisis," she said.

The percentage of AIDS victims among intravenous drug users in Thailand went up to 48 percent from 40 in the first half of 1998, she added. But in other groups, including sex workers, the trend was on the decline.

She attributed the decline to the presence of a strong AIDS prevention program in Thailand, one of the worst hit East Asian nations, even before the onset of the economic crisis.

"Because of that we find that HIV levels in almost all the groups continued their decline," she said.

Studies estimate there are more than seven million people with AIDS and HIV in the Asia-Pacific region. But the numbers are difficult to pin down.

A report last year by the European Union's AIDS program in Bangkok and the Institute of Population Studies at Bangkok's Chulalongkorn University said nine times as many Thais had died of AIDS than the 24,667 deaths officially reported.

Some 270,000 Thais have the disease, three times more than the official estimate of 90,637, the report said.

In Cambodia, some 180,000 of the 1.5 million people are believed to have the HIV virus. It is estimated that HIV infects 100 people each day, and 20 people die daily from AIDS-related illnesses.