Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - Sunday September 17, 2000
The World Bank report, due for official release next month, highlights the impact of a decline in condom use, particularly among young men who visit sex workers and have casual sex partners, the Bangkok Post reported.
"Any decline in condom use with such high infection levels could easily re-ignite the explosive epidemic of a decade ago," the bank report was quoted as saying.
In the early 1990s, Thailand suffered the most rapid spread of HIV/AIDS in the world, but won international acclaim for its efforts to bring the epidemic to heel through prevention campaigns and promotion of condom use.
Despite an overall decline in new HIV cases in Thailand, infections are increasing in some localities among prostitutes and intravenous drug users, the World Bank found.
Prevalence of HIV - the virus that causes AIDS - also continues to rise among pregnant women, up from 1.74 percent in 1997 to 2.02 percent in 1999, the report said.
"We had been moving on well in the past few years, but it seems as if we're now tripping," Mechai Viravaidya, a senator known as "Mr. Condom" for his anti-HIV campaigning, was reported saying in the Post.
He warned that there were 100 new infections in Thailand every day.
The newspaper said the World Bank report shows that while the use of prostitutes in Thailand was on the decline, one in five brothel-based sex workers in northern and central Thailand were HIV positive.
Sex workers who had migrated from Myanmar, also known as Burma, were at especially high risk of infection, as they were threatened with deportation if they contacted Thai social services.
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