Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1998. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International; Tuesday March 3 9:52 AM EST
Michael Smith, UPI Science News
"I haven't seen anything like this anywhere else in the world," said researcher David Celentano, a professor of health policy management at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The government mass education campaign caused a five-fold decrease in new HIV cases and a 10-fold drop in new cases of other sexually transmitted diseases among young army draftees in northern Thailand, he said.
And it appears to have had similar effects among the general population, Celentano said.
"We certainly did not expect a result as dramatic as this in such a short time," Celentano said.
The study followed two groups of young men from six northern provinces of Thailand. The first group, about 2,400 men, was drafted in 1991 while the second, about 1,600 was drafted in 1993.
For every hundred men in the first group, there were 2.5 cases of HIV infection every year, Celentano said. In the second group, the rate was half a case per year for every hundred men.
Sexually transmitted diseases also dropped sharply, he said. The first group had 300 cases of gonorrhea, while the second had only 20. "That's the level of change we were seeing," he said.
Celentano said similar campaigns could help stop the spread of HIV and sexually transmitted diseases in other Asian countries, as well as in more developed nations. "We have a lot to learn from Thailand," he said.
In the United States, he said, there are 12 million cases of sexually transmitted diseases a year, including 40,000 new cases of infection by HIV, the virus that leads to AIDS. Sexually transmitted diseases, such as gonorrhea and syphilis, are risk factors for HIV, because they cause tears and sores in the skin through which the AIDS virus can enter.
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