Inter Press Service - July 22, 1999
Johanna Son

Though Asia remains far behind Africa in terms of children and youth orphaned by AIDS, the report, 'Progress of Nations 1999', says the region has much to worry about.

"Fears are that, because of AIDs, Asia will see its orphan population triple by the year 2000," it said in the study released Thursday.

"At this moment, according to UNAIDS, the number of children living with an HIV-positive parent is far greater than the number of children already orphaned, a disturbing prospect for the future," the report added.

The number of AIDS orphans has risen 400 percent from 1994 to 1997 in Cambodia, Malaysia and India, along with Afircan countries like Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland and Botswana.

Over the same period, the population of children orphaned by AIDS grew by more than 300 percent in Vietnam and Burma, mor than 200 percent in Pakistan and more than 100 percent in Papua New Guinea.

Thailand still has the highest number of AIDS orphans, defined in the report as children under the age of 15 who have lost their mother or both parents to AIDS.

But the increase in such populations in other Asian countries is now picking up, even as Thailand continues to pose gains such as reductions in new infections.

"Perhaps no other developing country in the world has done more than Thailand in confronting the problem of HIV/AIDS," said Kul Gautam, director of UNICEF East Asia and the Pacific in remarks at the release of the UNICEF report in Chiang Mai, Thailand.

Due to the government's and society's response, during a four- year period condom use in Thailand has increased by 50 percent, the number of 21-year-old men visiting sex workers fell by half and the rate of new HIV infections fell by a third.

Hopefully, Gautam added, "the experience of Thailand will continue to prove invaluable to the other countries of the region as they come to grips with their own soaring and potentially catastrophic rates of HIV/AIDS infection."

At present, anti-AIDS efforts under the UNICEF Mekong project include the use of a short-course of drugs to reduce maternal-to- child transmission of HIV. This was first tried in Thailand and is now being tested in other Mekong countries. The rising HIV prevalence among children is "one indication of the rapid spread of the virus" which began spreading on a large scale across most of Asia just a decade ago, the UNICEF report says.

It points to growing HIV cases among children in countries that until recently had relatively low incidence.

Such is the trend in India, where 48,000 children had HIV at the end of 1997 -- thrice the number of those infected in 1994.

According to data from UNAIDS and the World Health Organisation, this figure made India rank tenth in the list of countries -- all the others of which are from Africa -- with the highest number of children living with HIV/AIDS. India's 48,000 children with HIV makes it the Asian country with the most such cases.

In China and Vietnam, which had maintained low rates of seroprevalence, the rate of infection among children quadrupled between 1994 and 1997," UNICEF explained.

The same number tripled in Cambodia, Malaysia and Burma, Gautam noted. Burma was reported to have 7,100 children living with HIV/AIDS, followed by Cambodia with 5,400, Pakistan with 1,800, China and Malaysia with 1,400 each, and Vietnam with 1,100.

Cambodia, where the first known HIV positive person was reported in 1991, already has one of the fastest growing epidemics in the world.

There, more 3.7 percent of adults are now thought to have HIV, according to the WHO's Western Pacific office in Manila. In its May update on HIV/AIDs, it said the HIV prevalence rate among sec workers was up to 64 percent in sex workers, up to 25 percent among the police and 6 percent among pregnant and married women.

Gautam says more than 40 percent of Cambodian sex workers in 19 provinces of the country under the age of 19 are HIV positive, while in Burma's urban areas the rate among teenage sec workers is 25 percent.

HIV figures among pregnant women are another indicator of the the disease's toll on the young.

Some 3 percent of pregnant girls aged 15 to 19 attending ante- natal clinics in major urban areas in Cambodia, are HIV positive. The figure stands at 2 percent in Thailand and 1 percent in Burma.

Apart from signifying the spread of HIV/AIDs, the pandemic's increase among children mean a corresponding increase in the numbers of those most vulnerable in society.

"Socially isolated because of the stigma of AIDS, they are less likely to be immunised, more likely to be malnourished and illiterate and more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation," UNICEF said in 'Progress of Nations 1999'.

So serious is the pandemic's toll on children that UNICEF has included in its "child risk measure", a new indicator it developed and discusses in 'Progress of Nations', the prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

The other four factors in this indicator are armed conflict, incidence of underweight children, under-five mortality and primary school attendance. (END/IPS/ap-he-pr/js/99)
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