InterPress News Service (IPS); Wednesday, 7 August 1996.
Amir Mir

However, health authorities in Pakistan counter the charge by an international agency that the government is going slow with AIDS control and point to the large sums now being spent on this.

"The government is not promoting the public education needed to fight the potential epidemic, apparently for fear of offending conservative groups," the U.S.-based Population Action International (PAI) said in a recent report.

Though aware of a looming AIDS/HIV epidemic in the country, the government is moving too slow to arrest its spread, the report noted.

"Observers commend the national mass media AIDS education campaign initiated by the Pakistan Peopls's Party government in 1994. Careful groundwork included a special effort to convince religious leaders of the programme's importance. But after a promising start, the programme has faltered," it adds.

The AIDS virus is known to be spread mainly by sexual contact, but promoting safe sex in conservative Islamic society is not easy. Pakistani health officials have tried to persuade Muslim clergy to deliver sermons on the disease based on a text prepared by the government in consultation with religious leaders.

Health officials in Pakistan deny that the AIDS control drive is faltering. They also find the PAI report's estimates of AIDS/HIV cases in the country exaggerated.

The fact that the present government has earmarked two million dollars for AIDS control this year clearly shows it is serious about tackling the threat, points out Pakistan's Health Minister Khurshid Ali Shah.

The Director General of Health, Naik Mohammad Sheikh questions the AIDS statistics in the report. According to PAI, some 50,000 Pakistanis are infected with the AIDS virus and the number will shoot up to a quarter million by the end of the century.

Mohammad Sheikh says there are no more than 35,000 HIV-infected people in the country.

However, the former manager of the national AIDS control programme, Kamran Masood, thinks the PAI estimates are right. He maintains there are 45,000 HIV cases in Pakistan and their number will go up to 200,000 by the year 2000.

According to the Pakistan office of the World Health Organisation (WHO), at least 60,000 people in the country are infected with the AIDS virus which is spreading at an alarming rate.

Independent community health workers too question the official figures. They point out that most cases are found in the frontier province and parts of Punjab which have widespread drug addiction and male prostitution, but not enough HIV screening facilities.

Pakistan began testing for the AIDS virus 10 years ago at the National Institute of Health in Islamabad. Since then 1.3 million people have been screened and about 1,000 have tested positive. Fifty five full-blown AIDS cases have been reported so far.

AIDS educators in Pakistan face an uphill task changing the popular view that the disease does not concern locals but only those with overseas links.

The disease was first found in a foreign visitor. Since then, it has been mostly reported among Pakistanis returning from an overseas stay. Some 500 Pakistanis were sent back last year by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) after they were reported to have tested HIV positive.

According to Abdul Mujeeb, the chief of the AIDS surveillance centre at the Jinnah Post Graduate Medical Centre in Karachi, Pakistani troops on overseas assignments have been specially vulnerable.

Unprotected sexual contact is the main cause of HIV spread in Pakistan, but more than a tenth of the cases are the result of tainted blood transfusions. According to the PAI report, a sizeable amount of blood is collected from professional donors, many of them drug addicts.

Health experts say that 90 percent of the blood in Pakistan's blood banks is not screened for HIV. Promoting safe blood transfusion is central to the national AIDS control drive along with public education, surveillance, control of sexually transmitted diseases, counselling and home care. (End/IPS/AM/MU/96)

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