InterPress News Service (IPS); Sunday, 24 August 1997
Edmond Toka

With very scarce domestic resources, preventing the spread of the killer disease is a major challenge for the governments in the region, they add.

Over the past decade, HIV has spread widely across the region, with an estimated 250,000 people in the Western Pacific infected with the virus. Of that number, 11,000 are full-blown cases of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) cases, according to the Manila office of the World Health Organisation.

Against the magnitude of the HIV epidemic in other parts of the world, the statistics in the Pacific look insignificant, but measured against the small national populations of the Pacific islands, the numbers represent a large problem, experts say.

"Overall therefore, the situation in the Pacific is more serious than the available statistics suggest," says a 1996 United Nations report on the AIDS situation in the Pacific.

Last year, a regional office of the UNAIDS was set up with funding pooled from the World Bank and other UN agencies, among them the United Nations Development Programme and the UN Fund for Population, to coordinate the activities of the world body relating to AIDS education and prevention.

It provides the core funding for the Pacific island countries' campaign against AIDS. For 1996-1997, for instance, some 60,000 U.S. dollars is earmarked for Fiji, Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Tonga, Samoa and Vanuatu, which are among the least developed countries in the world and depend heavily on foreign aid for development.

Since its first reported HIV case two years ago, Solomon Islands with a population of 400,000 has not reported new cases although authorities acknowledge that poor screening facilities conceal the real situation.

Whatever the real figure may be, the government is faced with the full responsibility of shouldering the expenses of caring for AIDS victims in cooperation with families, communities and churches through the Primary Health Care programme.

"At the moment, with the government's economic problems, it will be very difficult for the government," said Solomon Islands former AIDS Coordinator, Albby Lovi. "I do not know how much it will cost but reading from materials from overseas, it's going to be very costly for the government to hospitalise them."

News of the first HIV case in Solomon Islands two years ago was met with public anger. But health authorities managed to calm the public while keeping the identity of the victim secret. Following the uproar, the government adopted as policy the repatriation of any expatriate found positive with AIDS. At the same time, foreign nationals who upon screening are found to be carrying the disease, are not allowed into the country.

"AIDS hits the cream of our work force - this means the social and economic consequences for Pacific Island communities will be disastrous," Maposua Rudolf Keil, owner of the independent radio station FM98 in Samoa once said. Until last February, Samoa recorded six AIDS cases.

Health authorities in Vanuatu fear the same catastrophe. Although the country has not recorded any AIDS nor HIV cases, it has a high incidence of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) and AIDS Coordinator Myriam Abel fears an economic disaster if the fatal disease hits the country's work force.

Abel said the most sexually active age group in Vanuatu is the working category - 18 to 40 years old - which makes up 14 percent of the country's total population. If this age group is affected, it will have dire repercussions on the economic development of the country.

To avert any major impact on the economy, AIDS victims who are active in the work force should be allowed to continue working so that Vanuatu continues to reap the benefits of human resource investment and the economy is not suddenly shattered, said Abel.

In 1993, the Vanuatu government endorsed a national health policy which called for the protection of AIDS victims, maintain confidentiality, allow them access to information, education, training services and provide them with health and safety.

"We need to have in place some kind of legislation which will protect people with AIDS," said Abel.

Citing the potential impact of AIDS on economic growth, the UN Pacific report said: "Because HIV and AIDS affect people in their economically productive years, a major cost of the disease is the loss of the skills, experience and productivity of those who become ill and die."

Steve Vete, the Suva-based UNAIDS Inter Country Programme adviser, said the fact that the World Bank is the single largest contributor to AIDS prevention programmes in the world is an indication of the seriousness of the economic impact of AIDS.

"Potential gains from development projects can be completely negated by AIDS," he said. "Another challenge is to get leaders to recognise the importance of the linkages between development problems and the spread of HIV/AIDS and STDs so that they can devote resources to implementing programmes to prevent the spread of HIV and STDs."

An equally important concern is funding. Health ministries are also turning to non-government agencies to help them carry out AIDS prevention programmes. In one instance, the disappearance of aid money has made a mockery of the anti-AIDS campaign. An estimated 33,000 dollars that was supposed to have been transferred to the Solomon Islands AIDS committee has not been accounted for in Honiara and authorities are tracing its whereabouts.

AIDS Coordinator in Honiara, Kenneth Konare, said the absence of the money has restrained the committee from screening potential STDs and HIV patients and conducting training courses for laboratory technicians in the provinces.

If aid donations to combat the spread of AIDS were to go missing at top bureaucratic levels, AIDS will continue to take its toll on the population of the Pacific island countries, say anti-AIDS campaigners. (END/IPS/AP-HE-DV/ET/RAL/97)

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