The three highly populated countries “face one of the greatest challenges, and risks, in the global battle against HIV/AIDS,” Irene Fernandez, a Malaysian human rights campaigner, told the conference’s plenary session in a keynote speech.
She blasted “denial and fear” for making many Asian countries “a ticking time bomb for the pandemic.”
A report issued by the UN agency UNAIDS last week said that around 6.6 million people had HIV in the Asia-Pacific at the end of 2001, an increase of one million over the previous year, but cautioned that the tally could be a big underestimate.
Between 800,000 and 1.5 million Chinese have HIV, and the number of diagnoses had soared by 67 percent in the first six months of 2001 alone, UNAIDS said.
Around 150,000 people, many of them in the provinces of Henan, Anhui and Shanxi, became contaminated when they sold their blood to collection centres that used infected needles, it said.
India with an estimated total of four million infected people, has more people with HIV than any other country in the world except South Africa, and the epidemic is spreading beyond high-risk groups and into the main population, it warned.
In Indonesia, estimates are that up to 140,000 people have HIV/AIDS in a population of 215 million.
“Indonesia is an example of just how suddenly an example just how suddenly an HIV/AIDS epidemic can take off,” said Bernhard Schwartlaender, director of the HIV/AIDS department at the UN’s World Health Organisation (WHO).
“We knew that the ingredients for a sizeable epidemic were in place here for a long time,” he said.
“After years of silence, even the more cautious epidemiologists like myself started to wonder if Indonesia was indeed somehow immune.
“It was right at that moment that prevalence shot up among injection drug users and among sex workers. It then moved into the population at large, as shown by a steep increase in HIV prevalence among blood donors since the late 1990s.”
Of the 40 million people globally with HIV, 70 percent of them live in sub-Saharan Africa.
The epidemic, which began its march around the world more than 20 years ago, made its inroads in Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand in the 1980s among prostitutes and intravenous drug users, and only recently took a grip in the big-population countries.
At infection rates of one percent or less of their population, the Big Three are still a long way from the crisis in southern Africa, where in some countries more than a quarter of the adult populace is infected.—AFP