HIV infections unabated

This despite low overall incidence in the country.

The report released on Monday, just before a major AIDS conference in Bangkok opened, was surely bad news for Bangladesh. “In epidemiological term an increase in incidence of new cases is not good for any country,” Dr Tajuddin Oyewale, Unicef Bangladesh chief on HIV/AIDS told bdnews24.com while reacting to the report. The report ‘HIV in Asia and the Pacific’ showed that some countries of the region like India, Myanmar, and Nepal could check the new bout of HIV infections by as much as 50 percent. The control went up exponentially in countries like Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Philippines. But in Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, there is ‘no change’, meaning the increasing trend continues. “We need to ask ourselves why?” UNAIDS Country Coordinator in Bangladesh Leo Kenny told bdnews24.com. He said Bangladesh was not detecting enough cases and thus left many untreated . That's bad for prevention. The government record shows Bangladesh has less than 3000 people living with HIV as of last year and less than 1000 have access to the government supplied expensive drugs. But the UN estimates the number to be more than 8,000, which means many are left without treatment. “You cannot find them because they avoided getting tested with all the stigma attached," he said. "Bangladesh also lacks testing facilities." According to the report, Bangladesh has criminalised homosexuality, people who use drugs, and sex work, and it identifies these as barriers to HIV response. It said at least 20 percent people told researchers that they avoided going to a local clinic when needed because of their HIV status. He said the UN bodies were trying to find a way out. “The challenge is we cannot increase effort to get people on treatment. That is preventive and that will prevent new infections, but we cannot do that. Still, stigma keeps many away from coming for testing and treatment,” the UNAIDS Coordinator Kenny said. “We still use western blot and ELISA testing, we have to look at the community based testing. “It’s going to be critical if we scale up our efforts to treat more people,” he said particularly after a recent WHO guideline that advised starting drugs soon after the virus appears positive in blood. “It means we need to double the number of people on treatment.” Integrating HIV with the sexual reproductive health and mothers and child health services can increase their services, he said and that steps were on to find how the integration can take place. As a whole integration would be needed for the “continuum of care”, he said it would help scale up prevention, treatment, care and support. Bangladesh first identified a person with HIV in 1989. The response was extolled by many as Bangladesh started early intervention among the vulnerable people. The UNAIDS coordinator said ‘very strong effort’ of proving services to the injecting drug users helped Bangladesh to keep the epidemic below 0.1 percent. “That goes to the credit of Bangladesh’s strong leadership,” he said. But he says the new bout of infections would be a serious problem. But Bangladesh can eliminate at least new infections among infants as mother to child infection is easily preventable and the number is very low, he said. The Asia and the Pacific congress has brought together more than 3,000 participants from 80 countries to find ways for collective efforts to achieve ‘zero new infections, zero AIDS related deaths and zero discrimination’.