Hanoi: East Asian and Pacific nations must focus on young people in their efforts to control the spread of HIV/AIDS or face devastating epidemics of the killer virus, health experts warned on Wednesday.
"It is the youth that is most at risk," said UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) regional director, Anupama Rao Singh, speaking on the first day of a three-day regional conference on AIDS and children in Hanoi.
"If we don't contain it now, given the population base of Asia, it's going to have a devastating impact," she added.
About 2.5 million people in East Asia and the Pacific now live with HIV/AIDS and the total for Asia, including South Asia, is 8.3 million, according to the joint United Nations programme on AIDS (UNAIDS) figures.
While that figure is still far lower than sub-Saharan Africa's 25.8 million people, experts warn that HIV/AIDS is now growing faster in Asia than in any other region of the world.
"In the whole of Asia and the Pacific, we're talking about (a total population of) three billion people," said Singh. "One per cent prevalence in that would be phenomenal," she added.
Thailand, Cambodia, Myanmar and Papua New Guinea already face generalised epidemics, and the disease is now spreading in China, Vietnam and Indonesia from high-risk groups into the general population, said event organisers.
The focus in the AIDS battle must shift toward children and youths, experts said, through better education, prevention and treatment, fewer mother-to-child transmissions, and campaigns to reduce the stigma associated with the disease.
At the moment "children are notably absent from the response agenda" of most regional countries, said a briefing paper jointly prepared by organisers of the meeting that brought more than 200 experts from 20 countries to Hanoi.
"Religious and cultural taboos prevent parents and educators from addressing HIV/AIDS-related topics such as safe sex, condom use and harm reduction with children and adolescents," warned the report.
In East Asia and Pacific regions, more than 30,000 children are now HIV-positive and over a third of them caught the virus in 2005, says the United Nations in what experts call a conservative estimate.
The number of AIDS orphans is rising. By the end of last year, 450,000 children in the region had lost one or both parents to AIDS, and hundreds of thousands more were living with a chronically ill or dying parent.
"We're just seeing the beginning of a very big problem," UNAIDS advisor, Swarup Sarkar said. "In Thailand, 10 per cent of infections are now mother-child transmissions," he added. This is a level similar to those in sub-Saharan Africa.
UNICEF says children are especially vulnerable to infection because of poverty, violence, human trafficking and broken families they come form, in an economically dynamic region that is rapidly industrialising and urbanising.
Singh also added that increased migration across Asia meant that more men have multiple sexual partners and more children are being separated from their parents, making them more prone to high-risk behavior.
Despite the threat, cultural taboos and gaps in education mean that "there is generally very poor knowledge about the details of transmission," Lindsay Daines, who over sew an Asian youth survey for Save the Children, said.
"Even in Cambodia and Thailand, where there've been very strong education campaigns between 30 and 45 per cent of children still thought they could get the virus from mosquitoes," he added.
Comments
0 comment