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Asian Aids - A disaster waiting to happen
November 29, 2004
Taking the fight against Aids to those most vulnerable, government officials
and aid workers from the Asia-Pacific region opened a three-day conference
today in Pakistan aimed at helping women and girls avoid the deadly disease.
From street children to sex workers, the challenges are as wide and varied as
the region itself.
While some countries have made strides in fighting Aids – a program to convince
Thailand’s sex workers to force customers to use condoms has earned praise –
officials say other places are disasters waiting to happen.
Social and religious stigmas play large roles.
Some countries are so conservative that public awareness campaigns have been
slow to catch on. Condom use is patchy, partly due to a lack of education, and
partly to resistance in male-dominated cultures. The Roman Catholic church’s
policy against artificial birth control is another hurdle.
“We should say goodbye to complacency, which has crept in due to the belief
that our patterns of social behaviour are sufficient to contain the deadly
condition,” Dr. Srichand Ochani, head of the Aids Control Program in Pakistan’s
Sindh province, said at workshop on Friday in the capital, Islamabad.
He pointed out that even paramedics working for government-run health care
centres do not know much about HIV/Aids.
“In such circumstances, how can we expect the masses to be aware of the
pitfalls in unsafe sex and unsafe transfusion of blood, etc.?”
The stigmas extend to the pariah status that infection with the Aids-causing
virus HIV brings instantly in many cultures. That often leads to underreporting
of the disease’s spread.
For instance, Pakistan officially has 2,748 cases of people who have tested
HIV-positive. But international agencies say the real number could be as high
as 70,000.
Pakistan Health Minister Muhammad Naseer Khan, the conference host, termed
Pakistan a high-risk country with several factors – including migration, drug
addicts, infected blood transfusions and sex workers – contributing to the
spread of the virus.
Dr. Nafis Sadik, special adviser to the UN secretary general and special envoy
for HIV/Aids in the Asia-Pacific, was giving the conference an overview of the
pandemic in the region, with a special emphasis on the vulnerabilities of women
and girls and the disease’s effects on them.
Dozens of papers have been submitted on topics ranging from a unique Aids
prevention program for street children in India to an effort to start Aids
education at a madrassa, or Islamic school, in east Africa. Others deal with
orphans left behind by the deaths of parents from Aids.
A common thread at the conference is empowering women, including sex workers
and the victims of human trafficking, by overcoming gender inequalities.
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