HIV Increasingly Striking Women in Asia

BANGKOK, Thailand — Women in East Asia are contracting HIV at a faster rate than in the rest of the world, and there’s a worrying new trend in Thailand: men who have visited prostitutes are increasingly passing on the infection to their wives, the United Nations says.

In many parts of the world, but particularly in Asia, more women than men are getting the disease because it has spread beyond the brothels where most infections occurred 12 years ago, said the latest global HIV status report published Tuesday.

Women have also seen higher rates of infection than men because it is easier for them to get HIV – the virus that causes AIDS – through heterosexual intercourse.

Some 2.3 million out of the 8.2 million people currently living with HIV in Asia are women – an increase of 56 percent since 2002. Nearly 50 percent of the 39.4 million people infected with HIV worldwide are women, according to the report.

The epidemic has claimed about 540,000 lives in Asia so far in 2004.

In Thailand, about 90 percent of HIV transmission 12 years ago was between prostitutes and their clients. But now, about half of all infections are occurring in the wives of men who visit prostitutes.

Most new HIV infections in Asia occur when men buy sex, a practice that an estimated 5 to 10 percent of men in the region – many of them married or in steady relationships – engage in, said the report, citing household surveys in several countries.

The disease has spread through Asian countries at various speeds and levels of severity.

While national infection rates remain lower than in other parts of the world, particularly Africa, the large populations of many Asian countries mean that vast numbers of people are stricken with the illness.

While countries such as Cambodia, Myanmar and Thailand were hit early the epidemic, others – including Indonesia, Nepal, Vietnam and China – are only beginning to see the disease spread rapidly and must launch efforts to stop it.

AIDS has now been detected in all parts of China, spreading mainly through intravenous drug use and prostitution. It is also frequently transmitted sexually from injecting drug users to their partners in China.

In Myanmar, a large percentage of injecting drug users have gotten HIV, with as many as 78 percent testing positive for the virus in some areas of the military-ruled country last year.

In India’s Tamil Nadu state, about half of sex workers have been found to be infected with HIV.

But Bangladesh, East Timor, Laos, Pakistan and the Philippines, among some other Asian nations, have particularly low infection rates and still have the opportunity to thwart serious outbreaks, the report said.