The AIDS epidemic is on the move, and heading east. Sub-Saharan Africa may still be the worst affected by a scourge that reared its ugly head more than two decades ago, but Asia is next in line. "We have a major challenge over the next five years as this virus moves into the large demographic countries of Asia," says Gordon Alexander, senior program adviser for UNAIDS in India, where 3.7 million people already live with HIV/AIDS.
"I still get very nervous here when people say `we are not Africa,'" he said. "It's another barrier to action."
True, the problem is still colossal in sub-Saharan Africa.
The region is home to over 70 percent of the world's 36.1 million HIV-AIDS cases, and 3.8 million adults and children living there have been infected with HIV this year alone.
Only three Asian countries -- Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand -- have HIV rates over 1 percent among 15- to 49-year-olds.
But such low rates conceal huge numbers of affected people because of large populations. Although the epidemic began five to 10 years later in Asia than in sub-Saharan Africa, the region already has 6.4 million HIV cases.
Alexander reckons that could double in five years and double again by 2010 if nothing is done.
Such projections -- although far from exact because the momentum of local epidemics is hard to determine -- appear to be falling on deaf ears in some of Asia's worst-affected countries.
"I think by the efforts which we are now taking the progress of the disease will be checked," Indian Health Minister C.P. Thakur said a few days ahead of today's World Aids Day. "It will not increase in India, of that I am very certain."
But having almost eradicated sexually transmitted infections by the 1960s, China is now seeing a steep rise in these rates, which could lead to higher HIV spread down the road.
Chinese experts and the UN estimate there are 500,000 to 600,000 HIV-positive people in China.
"China is on a fast track to having a big epidemic. The truth of the matter is that the 600,000 cases as it is now is just the beginning," said Edwin Joseph Judd, the UN Children's Fund representative in China.
"Unless there's really substantial action in the next three, four years, the real danger is that we will have 10 million cases of HIV/AIDS in the year 2010, or worse."
Last year China broke a long-standing taboo against public discussion of sexual health and launched a nationwide media campaign to curb the spread of HIV through unsafe sex.
RSS