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.