Number of HIV/AIDS cases up to 501

JAKARTA (JP): Health authorities have recorded 35 new HIV/AIDS cases over the past month, taking the official number of Indonesians infected to 501 by Dec. 31.

Director General for the Control of Communicable Diseases Hadi M. Abednego said Tuesday night the new cases were found in North Sumatra, 18; Irian Jaya, seven; South Sulawesi, four; Jakarta, two; South Kalimantan, two; East Java, one; and West Kalimantan, one.

Hadi said of the total cases, 382 tested positive with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) and 119 with Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Seventy of the 501 officially reported AIDS sufferers have already died, he told Antara.

Health ministry statistics on gender show 337 are male, 144 female and 20 are unknown.

According to the official figure, 411 of those affected got the deadly syndrome through sexual intercourse. They are either heterosexual or homosexual. The rest got the virus through syringes, blood transfusions or from their infected mothers.

One baby is less than a year old. Most of the sufferers are of working age, between 15 and 49 years.

The people with HIV/AIDS live in 19 of Indonesia's 27 provinces.

Jakarta still tops the list with 160 known cases, followed by Irian Jaya, 118; Riau, 44; East Java, 37; Bali, 35; North and South Sumatra, both 23; West Java, 18; Maluku, 13; Central Java, eight; West Kalimantan, four; Yogyakarta, four; East Kalimantan, three and South Kalimantan, two.

AIDS is also apparently brewing in North Sulawesi, East Nusa Tenggara and West Sumatra, which each have one detected case.

Hadi said the actual number of cases could be 100 times higher than had been officially detected, because almost 90 percent of the recorded patients got the virus through sexual intercourse. (pan)