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UNITED NATIONS: HIV infection rates among gay men in many parts of
Asia are as severe as those which devastated US homosexual
communities in the late 1980s, top officials of the UNAIDS agency
said Tuesday.
Launching his agency’s 2008 report on the
global AIDS epidemic, UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot urged
more action to prevent the spread of the disease among gay men who
have unsafe sex and stressed the importance of working with affected
communities.
“All over Asia there are now epidemics of HIV
in men who have sex with men of the same magnitude that we saw in
this country 25 years ago,” Piot said.
Paul De Lay, director of Evidence, Monitoring
and Policy at UNAIDS, said the HIV epidemic among gay communities in
Asia was not new, but that it had recently reached the levels seen
in cities, such as San Francisco at the end of the 1980s when HIV
infections reached their peak.
It could be due to a number of factors,
including less funding for programs that target men who have sex
with men and the fact that there were new groups who were less aware
of the risks of unprotected sex, he said.
“Asia has recognized populations of men who
have sex with men for quite some time. The epidemic in these
populations started in the mid-1990s. What we see now is a
resurgence,” he said.
Meanwhile, the report noted that unprotected sex
between men was a “potentially significant but under-researched
aspect of the HIV epidemics in Asia,” citing countries such as
Thailand and Vietnam.
In China, unsafe sex between men could account
for up to 7 percent of HIV infections, it noted.
De Lay said there were also high infection rates
among gay populations in cities, such as Chennai and Mumbai in
India and in Indonesia’s capital Jakarta.
-- AFP
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