Meeting focuses on rising HIV infection among drug users

Meeting focuses on rising HIV infection among drug users

Tini Tran, Associated Press, Hanoi

Policy-makers from four "critically affected" Asian countries met
on Monday to discuss strategies to stem the rising intravenous
drug use responsible for 60 to 70 percent of all HIV infections
in their region.

Representatives from China, Indonesia, Myanmar and Vietnam
joined international health experts and non-governmental
organizations at the start of a three-day AIDS conference in
Hanoi sponsored by the World Health Organization.

Increasing HIV infection rates among drug addicts in Asia are
adding to the ever-growing AIDS crisis in the region, said Dr.
Andrew Ball of the World Health Organization at an opening press
conference on Monday.

"Injecting drug users play a critical role in the spread of
this epidemic," said Ball.

By the end of 2001, an estimated 6.6 million people across
Asia were living with AIDS or HIV, the virus that causes AIDS,
including about one million adults and children newly infected
that year, according to the United Nations.

Outside of sub-Saharan Africa, the AIDS epidemic in Asia
threatens to become the largest in the world.

The World Health Organization ties the increasing infection
rates to the easy availability and falling prices of
methamphetamines and heroin in Asia, as well as changing social
environments and the loss of traditional social support systems.

In China, where the government recently announced that some
one million people were HIV-positive, there are an estimated
three million injecting drug users, about half of whom share
needles and syringes, the WHO said.

In Indonesia, a third of intravenous drug users are infected
with HIV, while in Vietnam and Myanmar, HIV prevalence among drug
users in some areas is as high as 85 percent.

Ball said that a variety of intervention programs would be
discussed over the three days, including needle exchange,
methadone clinics, rehabilitation centers, drug education and
outreach.

Ball said that trial needle exchange and methadone programs
have been introduced into populations as diverse as hill tribe
communities in Thailand and urban communities in Vietnam.

"In the past, countries that have denied injecting drug users
and HIV/AIDS was a problem have been surprised. They say these
approaches aren't appropriate, but it's in these same countries
that they've been accepted and very effective," he said.

Still, the programs remain extremely limited versus the scope
of the problem, Ball said.

In Vietnam, where the government estimates 50,000 people are
HIV positive, the policy of dealing with HIV/AIDS as a "social
evil" on par with prostitution and drug use makes "widescale
implementation of intervention programs quite difficult," said
Dr. Pascal Brudon, WHO representative in Hanoi.

"The situation is not easy, but there are not many
alternatives," she said.