Indonesia’s AIDS epidemic among the fastest growing in Asia
Indonesia’s AIDS epidemic is among the fastest growing in Asia, especially among intravenous drug users and commercial sex workers, and half of new infections have been found in the easternmost Papua province, the World Health Organization said.
“Indonesia is facing a huge threat,” Bjorn Melgaard, WHO’s senior health consultant, said Saturday after an independent review team spent nearly two weeks surveying efforts to fight theAIDS virus in several provinces across the sprawling archipelago.
The team found that the government has put in place good strategies and intervention programs to handle the epidemic, but more needs to be done on a local level to secure long-term funding to fight the spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and to improve access to condoms, testing and counseling.
Surveillance of sexually transmitted disease also needs to be stepped up, the team found.
There were 2,873 new AIDS cases in Indonesia in 2006, a 140 percent increase from 1,195 in 2004, with most cases found in intravenous drug users and commercial sex workers, the team said.
Papua, the country’s most remote province geographically and politically, had by far the largest population of people living with the AIDS virus, accounting for 20 times the national average- around 50 percent of the country’s total number of cases.
“More than 2 percent of the population in Papua were infected with HIV/AIDS,” the report said, adding that health centers in the province must work especially hard to strengthen programs to prevent mothers from spreading the virus to their children.
WHO warned late last year that Indonesia showed a trend that its AIDS epidemic was still not under control, compared to neighboring Thailand and Cambodia, where rates of infection appear to stabilizing.
“Its HIV/AIDS epidemic is among the fastest growing in Asia,” Melgaard said.
HIV has infected an estimated 169,000 to 216,000 in the nation of 220 million.
AP