A report released on the eve of the 6th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) warns that "there is clear potential for extensive population spread of HIV if preventive action is too little or too late."
While early and large-scale preventive action have kept prevalence low in some parts of Asia, ?there is no guarantee that HIV will remain low indefinitely,? according to the report titled "Status and Trends of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic in Asia and the Pacific.?
Speaking at a news conference in Melbourne, Australia to launch the report, the UNAids executive director, Dr Peter Piot, said that it was no longer possible to ignore the scale of the crisis.
"We are kidding ourselves if we think Asia is not at risk from a major Aids epidemic, it is already there," he said.
"Today I think about a third or 40% of the world's people with HIV are living in Asia."
The report which is published by Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic (MAP) also warned that national figures are meaningless in huge countries such as China, India and Indonesia where some states and provinces have more inhabitants than most nations of the world.
In India, for example, the states of Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu each have more than 55 million inhabitants and have registered HIV rates greater than 10 percent in STD patients, far exceeding the national average of 0.7 percent.
Rather than national averages, the report has called for local data combined with an understanding of how HIV epidemics evolve, that provide a more realistic basis for assessing the future course of the region's epidemics.
In fact, the HIV/AIDS infection rates are beginning to surge in many areas of the continent, particularly China, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
According to the report, recent HIV increases in specific locations should be seen as a serious warning that the country is poised for a more widespread epidemic. For example, in Guangxi province in China, 9.9% of sex workers were found to have HIV in the second quarter of 2000 but the figure rose to 10.7% by the fourth quarter.
In Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam, HIV the infection rate among sex workers and their clients increased from virtually nil in 1996 to more than 20% in last year while Indonesia showed a significant jump in HIV among sex workers in three provinces from 6% to 26%.
"It is clear that in many countries, risk behaviour and HIV levels are on the increase," said Karen Stanecki, Chair of the MAP Network, "and that no society is immune to substantial spread."
It is also of little comfort to note that even countries such as Thailand and Cambodia which have successfully controlled the spread of HIV in the 90's have seen increases in infection rates, according to research by Family Health International. The research said the region's prolonged economic crisis is driving more people into sex work and drug use.
The report urges the widespread implementation of HIV prevention programs in every Asian nation to help curb new infections among these groups which have been identified as driving the waves of infection: men who have sex with men, injection-drug users, sex workers and their clients, the wives of men infected by sex workers, and newborn and breast-fed babies.
About Monitoring the AIDS Pandemic (MAP)
MAP is a collegial network of internationally recognized technical experts seeking to assess the status and trends of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic. MAP was created in 1996, through the collaboration of the AIDS Control and Prevention (AIDSCAP) Project of Family Health International, the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights of the Harvard School of Public Health, and the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).