Inter Press Service - October 11, 2000
Rosario Liquicia

But unlike the majority who keep silent because of fear or shame, the French Polynesian journalist has come out publicly about her status and has since involved herself in advocacy work to raise awareness in her country and in the South Pacific about HIV/AIDS.

For putting a human face on HIV/AIDS and working to educate people about the pandemic in the South Pacific, Dupont, 25, has been chosen as one of four people to receive the United Nations Development Programme's Fourth Annual Race Against Poverty awards this year.

Dupont, president of a Tahitian NGO for HIV/AIDS awareness in French Polynesia, has travelled around French Polynesia, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Cook Islands, talking to youth, families, communities and the public about the virus that causes AIDS.

To the media, she calls for more sensitive reporting on issues around HIV/AIDS. While raising awareness about HIV-AIDS among the Pacific islanders, she says she now wants to use the United Nations award to call attention to the plight of the people in the Pacific.

Dupont, along with a Polish priest, a mother from Malawi and a psychologist from Nicaragua who are her co-awardees, will be honoured by the United Nations during a ceremony marking the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty on Oct. 23. The theme is 'Breaking the Silence on HIV/AIDS'.

"To me it won't have any meaning until I can use that award to improve the reality of the Pacific," she said on Wednesday, during a tele-conference sponsored by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

"Although I am thankful, it hasn't been a means for me to improve and make things better," she said in answer to a query about how she feels about the award. "I hope in the future I can use that award, and UNDP or the UN give me through this award the means to do more work and improve the situation."

Dupont went public about being HIV-positive in December 1998 while she was still at university, two months after she found out she had it.

"I was shocked to be myself an HIV-positive person," she told journalists and UNDP staff participating in the tele-conference, which was part of the activities to mark the International Decade for the Eradication of Poverty and the campaign 'Breaking the Silence on HIV'.

"Although I knew about HIV/AIDS, I was still with the idea that it happened only to a certain category of people, people with certain behaviour," Dupont revealed.

Speaking from Fiji, she said the realisation that she had HIV helped correct many wrong ideas about the disease which even she, her family and friends, had about the deadly virus.

"My mum's reaction had been hard. She had this stereotype in mind that HIV happened only to certain kind of people with a certain behaviour," Dupont related. "She was depressed and affected that maybe she had failed in the education she had provided me, that she had failed as a mother."

Dupont said her experience taught her and those around her to look at HIV/AIDS in a different context. After the initial shock, she confronted her fears -- with support of family and friends -- and mustered enough courage to speak up about it.

Although the Pacific is still not considered a "critical area" compared to other countries in terms of the magnitude of people with HIV/AIDS, the rate of infection is a matter of concern for health experts.

Papua New Guinea is the "most threatened nation" in the South Pacific and has the highest number of reported AIDS cases, according to a UNDP briefing document. Of the 1,741 reported HIV- positive cases so far, 618 have died. The HIV prevalence rate, among people from 15 to 49 years of age, stands at .19 percent, which is considered moderate compared to Cambodia's high prevalence rate of 2.4 percent, for instance.

A UNDP official last year said that in terms of awareness and impact, PNG was in the same stage as Africa was a decade ago.

A decade ago, people were so caught in cultural taboos that those with HIV were driven underground and discussions about the disease were not welcome.

These observations may prove true not only in PNG, but in the rest of the Pacific as well. Even in countries where the pandemic has been around for decades, the stigma of being HIV-positive is still quite strong.

As David Lockwood, acting director of UNDP's regional bureau for Asia-Pacific, said Wednesday, certain countries are still in a stage of denial about the deadly disease.

He said that efforts are quite established to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS in Asian countries that have large numbers of people affected with the disease. However, there is still a lot to be done in other parts.

"And there are still some countries where a state of denial is in place, and the promotion of information and education programmes is important in addressing this denial," said Lockwood, who joined the tele-conference from Hanoi.

Going beyond health, he also stressed that "HIV is fundamental to poverty and anti-poverty efforts". He cited the case of Africa, "where we now know the devastating consequences of this pandemic on efforts for development".

"It is that what we are afraid of in Asia," Lockwood added.

"A huge amount of progress has been made in many countries in Asia, South-east Asia in particular, in terms of poverty elimination in recent years. There is a very serious risk that much of that progress will be set back if HIV is not addressed is the serious way that it demands," he said.

There are about 34.3 million people now living with AIDS worldwide, 95 per cent of them in developing countries. The number of new infections is estimated at about 15,000 a day.

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