IGNORANCE IS BLISS
Thailand was once considered to be in the vanguard of the fight against HIV.
After the country’s first AIDS cases were diagnosed among Thai and foreign gay and bisexual men in the mid-1980s, the epidemic took off, spreading through the country’s massive sex industry, their clients and then the men’s wives and babies.
In the 1990s, 35.5 percent of female sex workers across Thailand had HIV.
Then Thailand launched a condom use campaign targeting prostitutes and their clients, as well as antiretroviral treatment to prevent HIV transmission from pregnant women to their babies, which cut the estimated number of people infected each year to 8,100 in 2013 from 143,000 in 1991.
But over the past decade the numbers have started to rise again among certain groups, with many gay men unwilling to be tested, believing ignorance is HIV-free bliss.
At Silom Community Clinic, the CDC’s voluntary counseling and testing center for men who have sex with men founded by van Griensven, 46 percent of men who walk in have never been tested.
“That’s really high. When you’ve got roughly half of an at-risk population who’s never been tested, that needs to change,” Holtz said, adding that gay men in Thailand should get tested at least once a year, if not more often.
Somsak Akksilp, deputy director general of the department of disease control at the Thai health ministry, said spreading awareness through traditional media does not work with younger generations and outreach has to be clearly directed at gay men.
“They never watch television. They never read newspapers. So how can they get messages from government or public services?” Somsak said. “We should have more mobile clinics or outreach units to serve them in the places convenient for them.”
Testing is critical because awareness has failed to slow the epidemic, according to Piyathida Smutraprapoot, AIDS chief for the Bangkok Metropolitan Authority.
“If people know their status, they can learn how to prevent the spread to others,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation at the TestBKK event that attracted about 100 people.
The Asia Pacific Coalition on Male Sexual Health (Apcom), the Bangkok-based advocacy group behind TestBKK, later told Thomson Reuters Foundation that eight out of 76 men tested at the event were found to be HIV positive.
Van, a 24-year-old NGO staffer who asked to be identified only by his nickname, had his third HIV test at the event. His first test followed a casual hook-up. Van is now in a steady relationship but remains unsure if he is safe from the virus.
“With my boyfriend, I trust him to an extent – 99 percent. Even if he strays, I told him: ‘Please protect yourself’.” (Reuters) [eap_ad_3]
