Bangkok Post Dec 3, 2000

The news is not good from the UN agency which spearheads the global battle against Aids. The UNAids group issued its annual report last year, and figures were worse than the most pessimistic predictions. There were five million new HIV cases diagnosed last year. That brought to 36 million the number of infected people. The number of Aids lhpdeaths has now passed three million. The disease killed more people last year than in any other.

In short, the Aids epidemic is getting worse. There is still no vaccine to prevent either HIV or Aids, and little promise there will be one in the near future. Retroviral medicines have come a long way in a decade, and now can prolong the lives of some infected people, some of the time. Their lives depend on having the money to buy the high-priced drug cocktail, or living in a country whose government can afford it.

We can take a brief bow in Thailand for our efforts, but we can expect little applause. Compared with most countries, Thailand moved past the denial stage and began to battle HIV/Aids, somewhat seriously. Education has succeeded in a new respect for safe sex among many citizens. Official figures show that new cases of Aids have levelled off.

To put it another way, Thais continue to contract HIV and Aids from a variety of sources. Parts of our country have not got the message about this terrible epidemic. There is a real reason to hope for Thailand, but hope remains faint for the moment. That is partly our fault, and partly the fault of others.

If the world has under-estimated the spread of Aids, which it has, there are parts of the world which still are in deep denial over this serious problem. One such country is Burma. Less than a month ago, a leading member of the Burmese military junta said that Aids was not a problem in Burma because married Burmese never cheat on their spouses, and Burmese girls all remain virgins until they are married. The only Aids problem in Burma, he claimed, was that foreigners continued to claim that Burma had an Aids epidemic.

This denial conflicts with official Burmese figures given to the UNAids-but censored from publication in the Burmese mouthpiece media. They show that 47% of prostitutes in Rangoon and Mandalay were infected, according to tests last year. Government figures-again, censored-state that 57% of heroin addicts proved to be infected when tested last year. The government has banned condoms for seven years, and provides virtually no free testing. Needle sharing by heroin addicts is not just common in Rangoon tea stalls-it is a uniquely Burmese custom.

The threats are entirely related. Aids has spread in Burma largely because of the huge heroin addiction in the country. The government has banned studies of drug addiction, but experts who have lived in Burma estimate that 4% of men and 2% of women are heroin users. These figures are dangerous because the government interferes with proper studies. But they indicate that 600,000 Burmese have been infected with HIV/Aids through heroin alone.

As we learned in Thailand, Aids spreads geometrically. A heroin abuser can spread the infection to numerous other people. A husband who frequents prostitutes will hand his infection to his wife, who then will pass it to her baby during pregnancy.

Such official policies amount to a third security threat to Burma's neighbours. The Rangoon regime co-operates directly with drug traffickers and encourages them to boost their profits. The junta abuses its work force, forcing up to a million of them to flood Thailand, Bangladesh and India. The refusal of Burma to deal with the terrible Aids epidemic must be added to the threats from the dictatorship.
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