HIV/AIDS on the rise, experts say

HIV/AIDS is on the rise in Uzbekistan, say experts. Despite a currently low HIV/AIDS prevalence, health officials believe that the country occupies one of the leading positions in the world in terms of the rate of the disease's spread. "The situation with HIV/AIDS in the country is getting more complex, with the number of HIV/AIDS cases increasing," Muntaz Khakimov, the director at the national HIV/AIDS centre, told IRIN from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. According to Khakimov, there were some 2,000 officially registered HIV/AIDS incidences as of April 2003, compared to over 1,000 cases in 2002, thereby highlighting the growth dynamics of the disease. Since the first case was registered in 1991, there had been some 61 HIV/AIDS-related deaths, he noted. Concurring with Khakimov, Aziz Khudoberdiev, the national programme officer for the joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), told IRIN from Tashkent that, like in all the other Commonwealth of Independent States, Uzbekistan had seen a rapid growth of HIV/AIDS incidence. "Two years ago, Uzbekistan was just in the beginning stage of HIV/AIDS," he said, noting that the officially registered number of cases was only the tip of the iceberg, the real number being more than 10 times the official figure. Khudoberdiev asserted that the real number of cases could be as many as 30,000. "Eighty percent of the HIV-positive cases are men, while women constitute 17 percent, with the rest being children aged 0-14," he said, observing that almost 70 percent were injecting drug users, some 13 percent were sexually transmitted and 23 percent remained unknown. "However, the official ratio of sexually transmitted cases has risen from 10 to 16 percent," he added. "Since 1998, the number of HIV/AIDS cases has increased dramatically. During 2001-2002, the number of reported HIV cases rose by more than three times," Khudoberdiev said, noting a particularly steep rise in the first three months of 2003, during which the average number of monthly registered cases had been three times as high as during the same period the previous year. The registered cases had predominantly been found in Tashkent, as well as southeastern Surkhandarya Province bordering on Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan. Turning to the government's efforts to deal with the problem, he said it had approved a national strategic programme on HIV/AIDS prevention for 2003-2007. "This programme is a complex one, involving not only the Ministry of Health but other ministries and organisations as well, along with NGOs," he said, adding that the authorities had applied to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria for assistance. Khudoberdiev said UNAIDS in Uzbekistan had been working with the authorities in applying for US $24 million for HIV/AIDS prevention. The government had also opened about 230 points for the supply to the public of replacement syringes and condoms, along with educational and informative programmes. "The main goal of these activities is to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS among the injecting drug users," Khakimov said, pointing out, however, that the country needed assistance comprising "at least one million to two million syringes and one million condoms a year", to enable it to deal more effectively with the spread of the disease.