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Joint fight against HIV/AIDS announced

[Kyrgyzstan] A health worker in Osh checks blood for the HIV virus causing AIDS. IRIN
A health worker testing blood for HIV in the Krygyz city of Osh
Although the Central Asian region, home to some 60 million people, has a relatively low HIV/AIDS prevalence rate, a steep growth in infections over recent years is becoming a source of concern. In an effort at mitigation, four states - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - in collaboration with the World Bank, have announced a joint fight against HIV/AIDS. "This is going to be the first regional project on HIV/AIDS in Central Asia," Elena Karaban, a communications officer for the World Bank in Kazakhstan, told IRIN from the Kazakh commercial capital Almaty on Tuesday. Her comments came a day after the governments of the four ex-Soviet republics and the World Bank, the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the British Department for International Development (DFID) forged a regional cooperation agreement to avert an HIV/AIDS epidemic in Central Asia, laying the groundwork for a regional AIDS project. "The consensus from this high-level meeting marks an important advance in an effort to prevent a widespread HIV/AIDS epidemic in Central Asia," Dennis De Tray, World Bank Country Director for Central Asia, said in a statement. "All parties recognise the threat posed by HIV/AIDS. They agree that immediate action is essential if we are to prevent and control its spread and avoid the huge costs an epidemic would bring." And while the number of HIV cases in Central Asia remained relatively low, the growth rate of the infection was very high, probably one of the highest in the Europe and Central Asia region, Karaban claimed. One aspect of that threat is the region's proximity to Afghanistan, the world's top opium producer, and the transit of drugs from that country. The main mode of HIV/AIDS transmission in Central Asia is injecting drug usage, the World Bank official said. This being the case, the countries of Central Asia are highly vulnerable to a serious HIV/AIDS crisis over the next 20 years, the World Bank warned. "Without concerted action, we may expect to see the rapid development over four to five years of an HIV epidemic concentrated among injecting drug users, and achieving very high prevalence levels in this group, followed by a generalised epidemic, developing over 15 to 30 years, with sexual transmission as the predominant mode." There are some 8,000 officially registered HIV-infected in the region, a steep rise from just 500 cases in 2000. "Half of them, some 4,000, are in Kazakhstan," Karaban said. However, some estimates suggest that the actual number of HIV-infected in the region could be 10 times the official figure. Such developments could have serious economic implications for the region. According to the World Bank, the uninhibited spread of HIV would diminish long-term growth rates by roughly 10 percent in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, and by about 21 percent in Uzbekistan by 2015. Pavel Kuznetsov, head of the AIDS Centre in Karaganda, the Kazakh province with the highest HIV-AIDS burden in the country, accounting for almost a third of HIV cases, welcomed the new regional initiative. "If this regional project is implemented then we could slow down the growth rate of the infection and we could stop it at its current level it is now," he told IRIN from Karaganda. As for Turkmenistan, which doesn't officially recognise the problem of HIV/AIDS and has only one officially registered case, the most reclusive Central Asian state remained unwilling to participate in the regional initiative. "Given that it is a regional problem, with a high level of migration, the region should be approached as a whole. Further efforts will be made so that Turkmenistan is involved," Karaban noted. Estimated to cost some US $25 million, $20 million for the regional project will be provided by the World Bank with the rest coming from participating governments.

This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions

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