Indonesia's AIDS epidemic among the fastest growing in Asia

JAKARTA (AP): Indonesia's AIDS epidemic is among the fastest growing
in Asia, especially among intravenous drug users and commercial sex
workers, and half of new infections have been found in the
easternmost Papua province, the World Health Organization said.

"Indonesia is facing a huge threat," Bjorn Melgaard, WHO's senior
health consultant, said Saturday after an independent review team
spent nearly two weeks surveying efforts to fight theAIDS virus in
several provinces across the sprawling archipelago.

The team found that the government has put in place good strategies
and intervention programs to handle the epidemic, but more needs to
be done on a local level to secure long-term funding to fight the
spread of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and to improve access to
condoms, testing and counseling.

Surveillance of sexually transmitted disease also needs to be stepped
up, the team found.

There were 2,873 new AIDS cases in Indonesia in 2006, a 140 percent
increase from 1,195 in 2004, with most cases found in intravenous
drug users and commercial sex workers, the team said.

Papua, the country's most remote province geographically and
politically, had by far the largest population of people living with
the AIDS virus, accounting for 20 times the national average- around
50 percent of the country's total number of cases.

"More than 2 percent of the population in Papua were infected with
HIV/AIDS," the report said, adding that health centers in the
province must work especially hard to strengthen programs to prevent
mothers from spreading the virus to their children.

WHO warned late last year that Indonesia showed a trend that its AIDS
epidemic was still not under control, compared to neighboring
Thailand and Cambodia, where rates of infection appear to
stabilizing.

"Its HIV/AIDS epidemic is among the fastest growing in Asia,"
Melgaard said.

HIV has infected an estimated 169,000 to 216,000 in the nation of 220
million. (***)

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