AIDS battle must not be ignored, say experts

Indian sex workers put up AIDS posters

By staff and wires

MELBOURNE, Australia -- Condoms appeared to be reducing the number of new AIDS cases but no government can afford to ignore the epidemic, a conference in Australia has heard.

HIV sufferers and activists have called on drug companies to put people before profit in the fight against the disease, which is most prevalent among the world's poorest nations.

Cambodia has the highest national rate of HIV/AIDS infection in Asia, but the number of new infections each year has dropped as prevention strategies take effect, the conference was told on Saturday.

About 3,000 officials from more than 40 countries are represented at the sixth International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP), which runs until October 10 in the southern city of Melbourne.

Thailand and Cambodia have seen the numbers of people infected drop mainly because of the wider use of condoms.

The biggest concern, as in other Asian countries, is the spread of the disease via men who have sex with prostitutes and then pass on the infection to their wives or girlfriends.

Low-risk groups

"It's estimated that 12 to 13 percent of all males in Cambodia have sex with more than one type of sex partner," Dr Hor Bun Leng, of the Cambodian National Centre for HIV/AIDS told the congress.

"That's a big group for transmission from high to low-risk groups," he said.

"But the number of new HIV infections each year has dropped as prevention strategies take effect."

Some 36 million people around the world are living with HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS, according to the United Nations AIDS agency, UNAIDS.

In Asia, about 6.4 million people carry the disease, second only to the sub-Saharan Africa region.

Among sex workers, 31 percent of prostitutes are HIV positive, compared with 16 percent of occasional sex workers such as women who work in bars, karaoke clubs and massage parlors.

In 1998, the rate among prostitutes peaked at 42.6 percent.

Rate of infection

Infection levels in Cambodia reached above three percent a year before they began falling thanks to prevention programs, according to a U.N.-sponsored report released ahead of the conference by the Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic network.

The rate of HIV infection is now about 2.7 percent, or 170,000 adults.

In Cambodia, 15 percent of married men and 21 percent of unmarried men went to prostitutes in 2000, compared with a total of 11 percent in Japan and 10 percent in Thailand, surveys have found.

So far, the spread of AIDS across Asia has been relatively contained to high-risk groups including sex workers, intravenous drug users, and homosexual men.

The Associated Press & Reuters contributed to this report.