BANGKOK, Nov 30, 2006 (AFP) - Nee's blind eyes stare out vacantly as she quietly recounts the day she discovered that she had contracted HIV.
After years of fatigue, trouble walking and blurred vision, her doctor told her that she was HIV positive.
"I got the infection from my husband," said the softly spoken 44-year-old, who asked to be identified only by her nickname.
After confronting him, Nee found out that her husband had been having sex with prostitutes and did not know that he was carrying the disease.
"I have always been good. I have never been bad to anyone," she said, clutching a cane in her lap with both hands. "I trusted my husband."
Nee is the new face of AIDS in Thailand, where married women now make up the largest group -- about one third -- of new HIV infections in the country.
Usanee Janngeon, the director of the hospice where Nee is now living, said almost all of the women who came to the center had been infected by their husbands.
"For myself, I see that as a crime," she said. "You are not killing someone instantly but you are giving them something that can't be treated."
Thailand has long been regarded as a success story in the fight against HIV/AIDS but experts say the epidemic is evolving and hitting groups previously considered at low risk for contracting the disease.
"It is something that still needs to be fundamentally addressed," said Patrick Brenny, UNAIDS country coordinator for Thailand.
But despite the threat to new groups, like the rest of Southeast Asia, the majority of the patients at the clinic here continue to be men who contracted the disease through unsafe sex or intravenous drug use.
Risky forms of behavior -- unprotected paid sex, sex between men and unsafe injection drug use -- remain the main cause of HIV infection in Southeast Asia, which has the highest infection levels on the continent.
Some 8.6 million Asians are infected with the HIV virus, according to the latest UNAIDS report released last week.
An estimated 960,000 Asians were newly infected over the past year and 630,000 people died of AIDS-related illnesses, the report said.
"In general, in Asia, the epidemic continues to grow," Brenny said.
He added: "There isn't a comprehensive response in any country of the region."
Inadequate prevention programs, care and support, along with lack of access to antiretroviral drugs, have caused the epidemic to flourish among the high- risk populations.
But as the epidemic matures and as the disease moves beyond these groups, some countries are seeing increased infections among married women, such as Nee, and teenagers.
"It seems like Thailand has stepped back from where we were before," said Anuchit Jittrathanakul, Thailand program manager at Population Services International, a non-profit organization that tackles health problems in low-income populations.
Previous prevention efforts and access to antiretroviral drugs in Thailand contributed to a 10 percent decline in the number of new HIV cases last year and sharp reductions in the number of deaths.
But after years of success, Thailand has stopped focusing so heavily on prevention and this is allowing HIV/AIDS to make its way into the previously low-risk groups.
"They are not actually feeling they are at risk," Anuchit said. "They have the perception that they are safe."
In Cambodia also, the disease is starting to move beyond groups engaging in risky behavior.
The country has managed to slow its spiraling infection rate but still has the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the region.
Women account for almost half of all HIV cases in Cambodia and more than a third of AIDS deaths, with husband-to-wife transmission emerging as the main source of new HIV infections, according to the National Center for HIV/AIDS, Dermatology and Sexually Transmitted Diseases.
UNAIDS coordinator Brenny said that while the disease had not taken a hold in the general population in most parts of Southeast Asia, other countries in the region could be seeing more infections among low-risk groups in a decade if they did not make stronger efforts to control it.
He warned that if nothing was done in Thailand to increase prevention programs in the next ten years, the strides that the country had made may not account for much.
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