Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2001. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
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United Press International - Saturday, 7 July 2001
"It is certainly the hot spot of the epidemic in Asia, in terms of the highest prevalence of infection," Peter Ghys, an epidemiologist in Geneva, Switzerland, with the U.N. office on AIDS, told the Times.
"In my more pessimistic moments, I'm afraid that in the next few years more people could die of AIDS than in the (Khmer Rouge leader) Pol Pot time," the Rev. James Noonan, administrator of the Hope HIV/AIDS Project, told the newspaper. In the mid-1970s, more than 1 million people died in Cambodia under the Communist Khmer Rouge. An estimated 170,000 people in Cambodia have AIDS.
U.N. specialists say awareness of the illness is on the rise, with safe-sex practices such as the use of condoms, increasing. But the challenge in Cambodia is that it has a booming sex industry. It is typical for married men to go to prostitutes. The men then go home to their wives, who become infected, too.
"Now I am suffering just like in the Khmer Rouge time," Ngau Rotheany, 39, told the Times. Her husband died of AIDS, and she is a patient at a Phnom Penh hospital. "No husband, no money, nothing to eat, sick and suffering," she said of herself.
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