Philippines HIV infections ‘doubling every year’ – UN

BANGKOK (AlertNet) – New HIV infections in the Philippines are doubling every year due to inadequate prevention efforts and poor knowledge of risky behaviour among vulnerable groups, a top U.N. official said in an interview.

This year, six new infections a day are occurring, compared with two a couple of years ago, Teresita Marie Bagasao, Philippines country director for UNAIDS, the U.N. agency for HIV/AIDS, told AlertNet.

HIV prevalence among the general population remains low at less than one percent. But after more than two decades of a low-level epidemic, “new cases are doubling every year and prevalence among key populations most at risk in certain cities has gone beyond 1 percent,” Bagasao said.

In Cebu, for example, prevalence among injecting drug-users – one of the three highest-risk groups, alongside people who sell sex and men who have sex with men – soared from 0.6 percent in 2009 to 53 percent in 2011, according to UNAIDS.

The rate of infection among men who have sex with men in Manila and Cebu is now estimated at 5 percent.

Jonas Bagas, a member of the Philippines National AIDS Council, said the Department of Health recorded more new cases of HIV infection in 2010 than the cumulative number of fresh cases reported from 2001 to 2005, according to Filipino news outlet Newsbreak.

Thirty years into the AIDS epidemic, Asia Pacific is at a crossroads, said a report launched on Friday in Busan, South Korea, at the 10 th International Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific.

“While the region has seen impressive gains – including a 20 percent drop in new HIV infections since 2001 and a three-fold increase in access to antiretroviral therapy since 2006 – progress is threatened by an inadequate focus on key populations at higher risk of HIV infection and insufficient funding from both domestic and international sources,” it said.

LOW CONDOM USE

In the Philippines, infections are rising partly because of the low coverage and quality of HIV prevention programmes targeted at high-risk groups. They reach less than 40 percent of the most vulnerable populations, and of those groups, only 14 percent have accessed HIV testing and know the results.

Many cities have no HIV/AIDS prevention programmes, Bagasao said. And even in places that do, attitudes and behaviours towards prevention methods, including condom use, remain negative.

Poor knowledge of the risks is pushing infections higher. For example, less than a third of men who have sex with men use condoms, while stigma and discrimination hamper efforts to reach out to them, Bagasao said.

There are also concerns over funding to strengthen prevention programmes at a time when contributions from donors for HIV/AIDS responses are declining across the world.

In the Philippines, only a fifth of annual spending on HIV/AIDS comes from the government. The rest is from external sources, including the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the United Nations and the U.S. government development agency USAID.

In response to rising HIV infections, the government is seeking to amend the Philippine AIDS Prevention and Control Act, which critics say is outdated and conflicts with recent legislation. The Anti-Trafficking in Persons Act, for example, stipulates that a condom can be used as evidence of prostitution, which is against the law.