Bangkok World AIDS Day 2006 © peripheries

According to the Bangkok Post, Thailand Deputy Public Health Minister Manit Nopamornbode said that “about 11,700 people were expected to become new [HIV/AIDS] sufferers”.

Amongst these new sufferers, Manit identified “women who will get HIV from their lovers [...] gay men who have unprotected sex [..] men who get HIV from sex workers [and] will infect their wives, intravenous drug users, those having casual sex and prostitutes”

Children excluded, that is pretty much everybody.

Depending on the sources, there are between 516,000 t0 610,000 people living with HIV and AIDS in the Land of Smiles. From a very early stage (1990) IDU had been identified as a population seriously at risk of being infected by HIV. Today it is thought that around 100,000 to 275,000 IDU use heroin, 80 percent of whom inject. The former Thaksin administration “shot on sight” policy did not really help addressing the issue of HIV amongst this group and not much if anything at all is being done to provide clean needles to Thai IDU.

Sex workers were also very early in time identified as being at risk and ‘100% condom’ programmes enforcing mandatory condom use in brothels contributed to a significant reduction in HIV prevalence in the 1990s but have since then lost momentum and are not enforced to level sufficient to keep the epidemic under control. Interestingly Mechai Veravaidya “Mr Condom” and chairman of the sub-committee on national Aids prevention, said that “research last year had shown the average age at which youngsters become sex workers is 16 and 44% of them were students”. If true, that’s flying in the face of the “common belief” about poverty driving to sex work.

Men who have sex with Men (MSM) have finally been recognised as vulnerable individuals too, as well as young people whose condom use is low. The Bangkok Post reports that “In a December survey, 69% of young people were unaware of safe sex, said Kittipan Kanjina, a representative of the youth network against HIV/Aids”

So here we go again with an HIV epidemic for which much is known, for which successful prevention programmes had been implemented but for some reasons, incidence and prevalence are on the rise again. The situation is such that, as AVERT puts it, “there is now a fear that the country will witness a second wave of the epidemic.”

And once more, with the exception of IDU, low condom use is one of the major reason why people get infected with HIV, followed by people’s ignorance about the virus.

As a result, Thailand is embarking on three rather woolly HIV policies, including “reducing the number of new sufferers before 2011, providing unrestricted access to antiviral drugs and treatment, and access to social welfare for more than 80% of people living with HIV/Aids and their families.”

It remains to see how reducing the number of new sufferers is going to be done.

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