KOBE, JAPAN -- The Asia-Pacific faces a "silent tsunami" as HIV/AIDS rates surge in a region home to more than half the world's population, a United Nations official said yesterday.
Despite the fact that 99 per cent of Asians don't have the virus, in 2004 this region posted the world's second-highest infection rates after sub-Saharan Africa, said JVR Prasada Rao, regional director of the UNAIDS support team for Asia and the Pacific.
"The virus doesn't kill hundreds of thousands at a thunderous stroke and it doesn't provide vivid television pictures," he said during the Seventh International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific. "Rather, it is a silent tsunami."
The disease is also attacking women, who account for 40 per cent of the cases in Asia, a region so massive that percentages measuring national infection rates often are useless in telling the real story of the millions who are living with the disease, said Dr. Shigeru Omi, the World Health Organization's Western Pacific regional director.
"Can you imagine that every day 1,500 people are dying? Every day," he said. "It's a huge amount and 3,500 are newly infected every day."
The virus is also circulating beyond certain populations in Asia -- such as injecting drug users and prostitutes -- and moving more steadily into the general population, he said.
For instance, an injecting drug user could also visit a sex worker and then go home to a wife who could contract the disease unknowingly and transmit it to an unborn child.
It is that kind of overlap that's fuelling an HIV/AIDS explosion in the Asia-Pacific region that will lead to another 12 million infections during the next five years if the disease is left unchecked, UNAIDS has warned.
During the mid-1980s, while the United States and Europe grappled with raging epidemics, the percentage of people infected in Asia was undetectable.
During the 1990s, Thailand and Cambodia were Asia's only two countries experiencing major problems. But by 2004, the numbers in some Asian countries rivaled those in sub-Saharan Africa.
Rao stressed that it's not too late, and that strong national leadership and more funding can turn the epidemic around. However, he said, "If national responses remain as they are today, we're all in deep trouble.
"We know what to do. We are just not doing enough of it."
He said prevention programs must be expanded to target groups with spiking infection rates. Out of 16 Asian countries, a study found that only one per cent of men who have sex with men had been reached with HIV/AIDS messages -- and only five per cent of injecting drug users.
Funding must also be increased to $5 billion US over the next two years to make a dent in the epidemic and affordable treatment must be made available to more people, he said.
But even in places where treatment is available, some people refuse to go for testing or treatment out of fear their HIV status will be disclosed and they will be ostracized by society.
Making affordable treatment widely available is another way to lessen stigma and discrimination, but it remains scarce in the region.
In India -- which has the world's second-highest number of HIV infections after South Africa -- only about five per cent of the five million now infected receive treatment.
