No miracles yet

From Farah Mihlar in Geneva

According to the United Nations body on AIDS (UNAIDS) over 30 million people are currently infected by AIDS. Each day an estimated 15,000 people including 1500 children become newly infected with the disease. Ninety percent of this occurs in the developing world. These were some of the startling revelations made at the 12th World AIDS conference held last week in Geneva, Switzerland. The focus of the 1998 conference was to create a global effort to address problems related to the epidemic, and much of the attention was focused on fighting the disease in the third world. "Millions of people are becoming infected with HIV in the developing world every year - 10 million since we last met two years ago," said Chairman of the conference Dr. Bernard Hirschel in his opening speech. Cause for alarm - yes for the third world but apparently not so much for Sri Lanka.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS 1998 report released at the conferences says "Rates of HIV infection remain low in several South and South East Asian nations.. In Bangladesh, Indonesia, Laos, Pakistan, the Philippines and Sri Lanka infection has not reached 1 adult in 1000 yet." Other countries in the region including Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia and India have much higher levels. The reason for the difference is not clear, the report says "and nor is there any assurance that prevalence will remain low in those areas that have seen only a modest spread so far, given widespread occurrence of risk behaviour including commercial sex and in some places drug injecting, the report said.

In neighbouring India, HIV infection rates, at under 1 percent of the total adult population, are still low by standards of many countries, although well over 10 times higher than in China, the report said. "Surveillance is patchy, but it is now estimated that about 4 million people in India are living with HIV. That makes India the country with the largest number of HIV infected people in the World," it said. According to the report only few places in Asia have sophisticated equipment needed to monitor the spread of AIDS. As a result estimates of HIV patients in Asia is determined on less information . A point of concern for Asia is that much of the continent has seen an 100 percent increase in the disease since 1994. Sri Lanka is one of the more fortunate countries but still remains highlighted in red, in the 98 report. The country in the past three years has seen a 10 -100 percent increase in the prevalence of HIV, the report said. Asia needs also to be concerned about the rapid increase of HIV through injecting drug use. Sri Lanka has also been marked out as a country where the disease is spreading rapidly through the usage of injections by drug addicts.

The reason for this is the common use of injecting equipment which causes the disease to spread. The report suggests the best way to overcome the problem is to create a greater awareness and to introduce systems where needles and other injecting equipment can be freely distributed to drug addicts thereby preventing common use. According to the report the intriguing fact about the disease is there is no common explanation as to why the spread is more rapid in some countries and not in others. "Globally it is certainly the poorer and less educated who are feeling the brunt of the HIV epidemic," the report says, but adds that the epidemic has spread in different ways through different groups of people in different parts of the world. This is why the need to understand the unusual and special problems each country and community faces and the different ways of overcoming these problems has become an urgent need today. This is precisely the purpose the conference served. Over 13,000 delegates from some 170 countries shared their experiences and listened to latest medical research on fighting AIDS. It was probably the biggest gathering of people who had come with the purpose of controlling a disease that has already claimed millions of lives not taking into consideration social strata nor education not even age. In one of the sadder discoveries it was reported that 8.2 million children have become orphaned since the beginning of the epidemic by losing their parents to the disease.

The conference did not have any new boast on research for a cure for AIDS but researches who came from all parts of the world gave signs of hope that there could be some success in fighting the disease. Medical experts discussed the success and failure of a vaccine to combat the disease, use of other drugs on AIDS patients, relationship between HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases and health care systems available for HIV patients. Among the positive announcements was the introduction of two AIDS drugs that could cut by two-thirds the pills a patient must take. The emphasis however was more on curtailing the spread of AIDS and increasing awareness and education among people as to how the disease spreads. The UN announced a programme to benefit 30,000 pregnant HIV infected mothers in 11 of the world's poorest nations by providing parental care to the new-born babies. The 98 conference may not have found the miracle the 30 million people infected with HIV have been looking for, but in many ways it found smaller solutions to a huge problem. Most of all it was concerned with 'bridging the gap' between the less developed nations and developed world in fighting a disease that spreads like plague. In the last year 5.8 million people were infected with HIV while 2.3 million people died of AIDS in the same period. A clear point made at this year's conference is that time is running out for the rest of the world

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