HIV spreading

Thursday, December 1, 2011

IT'S been 30 years since five young men from California first baffled the medical world with their unusual form of immunodeficiency, which turned up two years later in other young men in different parts of the United States, Australia and Europe.

The culprit has since been identified: the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). But its march continues. Some 33 million adults and children worldwide are now estimated to be living with HIV.

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HIV causes Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), the syndrome of opportunistic infections and diseases that develops as immune-suppression deepens, and leads to death.

Target

To check the advance of the disease, Target 6 of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals (MDG) tasks its 193 member-states to halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV by 2015, as well as provide universal access to treatment for HIV by 2010.

But the 2010 Philippines Progress report on the MDGs says the chances are low that the Philippines will attain the 2015 target.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report shows that instead of reversing the trend of infections, HIV is spreading in the country.

Only 7,684 HIV cases have been recorded in the Philippines from 1984 to September 2011, not even a tenth of one percent of the country’s population.

But while it took the country some 20 years to reach 200 cases a year, the growth in cases has been explosive since.

Some 342 new cases were reported in 2007, then 528 cases in 2008, and 835 in 2009.

The 1,000 level was breached when 1,591 new cases were recorded in 2010, then 1,669 in
the first nine months of this year alone.

“The Philippines is one of only seven countries globally with more than a 25 percent increase in HIV incidence in the last 10 years,” said UNDP country director Renaud Meyer. The others are Armenia, Bangladesh, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan.

In contrast, in at least 56 countries around the world, new HIV infections have either stabilized or been reduced, said a report by the Local Government Academy of the Department of the Interior and Local Government this year.

New modes

In May, DOH Assistant Secretary Dr. Eric Tayag said that of the four main modes of HIV transmission—males having sex with males (MSM), heterosexual sex, drug use and mother-to-child transmission, MSM has trumped heterosexual sex as the main mode of transmission in the country since 2007.

He also singled out Cebu City as the site of an “epidemic” of HIV among injecting drug users (IDUs), after more than half of IDUs surveyed in Cebu this year were found to be HIV positive.

On World Aids Day today, Sun.Star Cebu begins this three-part special report on the spread of HIV in Cebu, particularly among the MSMs and IDUs, and the local responses to this threat.

The theme for this year’s World Aids Day celebration is “Getting to Zero,” in line with the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS’ vision of “Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.”

It’s a long shot, but one worth taking if the Philippines is to prevent the infection from jumping from the Most At Risk Populations to the general population.(First of three parts)