Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2004. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Associated Press - November 28, 2004
From street children to sex workers, the challenges are as wide and varied as the region itself.
While some countries have made strides in fighting AIDS - a program to convince Thailand's sex workers to force customers to use condoms has earned praise - officials say other places are disasters waiting to happen.
Social and religious stigmas play large roles.
Some countries are so conservative that public awareness campaigns have been slow to catch on. Condom use is patchy, partly due to a lack of education, and partly to resistance in male-dominated cultures. The Roman Catholic church's policy against artificial birth control is another hurdle.
"We should say goodbye to complacency, which has crept in due to the belief that our patterns of social behavior are sufficient to contain the deadly condition," Dr. Srichand Ochani, head of the AIDS Control Program in Pakistan's Sindh province, said at workshop Friday in the capital, Islamabad.
He pointed out that even paramedics working for government-run health care centers don't know much about HIV/AIDS.
"In such circumstances, how can we expect the masses to be aware of the pitfalls in unsafe sex and unsafe transfusion of blood, etc.?"
The stigmas extend to the pariah status that infection with the AIDS-causing virus HIV brings instantly in many cultures. That often leads to underreporting of the disease's spread.
For instance, Pakistan officially has 2,748 cases of people who have tested HIV-positive. But international agencies say the real number could be as high as 70,000.
Pakistan Health Minister Muhammad Naseer Khan, the conference host, termed Pakistan a high-risk country with several factors - including migration, drug addicts, infected blood transfusions and sex workers - contributing to the spread of the virus.
Dr. Nafis Sadik, special adviser to the U.N. secretary general and special envoy for HIV/AIDS in the Asia-Pacific, was giving the conference an overview of the pandemic in the region, with a special emphasis on the vulnerabilities of women and girls and the disease's effects on them.
Dozens of papers have been submitted on topics ranging from a unique AIDS prevention program for street children in India to an effort to start AIDS education at a madrassa, or Islamic school, in east Africa. Others deal with orphans left behind by the deaths of parents from AIDS.
A common thread at the conference is empowering women, including sex workers and the victims of human trafficking, by overcoming gender inequalities.
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