HIV/AIDS in Asia and the Pacific Region

The HIV/AIDS epidemic poses a very serious health and developmental problem in many countries of the Asia Pacific region. Given the presence of risk behaviours and a population size representing 60 per cent of the world’s people, the potential for epidemic growth is very real. Since the extensive spread of HIV began at the end of the 1980s, more than 7 million people in the region have become infected. In the year 2003 alone, it is estimated that more than 500 000 died of AIDS in Asia about 1500 a day. Experiences in the region have shown that intervention activities can successfully bring about reductions in HIV prevalence, provided they are combined with high level political commitment and leadership. The priority is to implement HIV interventions among those sections of the population with high-risk behaviour, such as sex workers and their clients, injecting drug users, and migrant workers. There are, however, still many areas of concern. Interventions are needed urgently to prevent HIV caused by injecting drug use and high-risk sexual behaviour and to scale up the coverage of these interventions in all countries so that they have a nation wide impact on HIV prevalence. Besides prevention, care and treatment are also urgently needed, integrated together as one intervention package. Already much progress has been made in the region, but considerable additional efforts are needed to enhance access to antiretroviral therapy by the patients who need it and also to ensure that the drugs are used appropriately and rationally.