World Bank and government pledge to battle HIV/AIDS

The World Bank’s regional project to control HIV/AIDS in Central Asia and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in Kyrgyzstan on Tuesday signed an agreement to fight the epidemic in the Central Asian country. “We need to strengthen national coordination mechanisms on fighting AIDS and this agreement will help us to do so,” Tilek Meimanaliev, head of the World Bank’s Central Asia Regional AIDS Control Project, said in the Kyrgyz capital, Bishkek. The World Bank official said that thanks to the agreement, AIDS centres in the region would be provided with necessary medical equipment, as well as assistance with regard to epidemiological surveillance and training of paramedics. “HIV/AIDS does not have borders and therefore there needs to be an inter-regional approach to this menacing disease,” Sezin Sinanoglu, acting head of UNDP’s mission, said. UNDP has been working in Kyrgyzstan on HIV/AIDS prevention amongst vulnerable groups and assisting in the development of national strategies since 1997. There are 916 registered cases of HIV/AIDS in the country, according to the Kyrgyz AIDS centre, with the majority of them in the south. The main mode of transmission - some 80 percent of all registered cases - is through injecting drug use, the centre said, adding that almost 50 people had died since 1996 because of AIDS. However, experts claim the real figure is 10 times that number. “A lack of monitoring and assessment systems, as well as stigma attached to [HIV] patients are major problems which means we cannot know the exact number of HIV-infected people,” Meimanaliev added. Their comments coincided with the launch of a new global report on HIV/AIDS by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS). The report said the epidemic was on the rise in many post Soviet states - including four Central Asian republics: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan - fuelled mainly by injecting drug usage. Central Asia lies on the front line of drug trafficking from Afghanistan, the world's top opium producer. In Kazakhstan, an estimated 12,000 people were living with HIV by the end of 2005. Overall prevalence was 0.1 percent, but it jumped to 56 percent among drug users in one recent study, according to UNAIDS. An estimated 31,000 people (0.2 percent of the general population) were infected with HIV in Uzbekistan, Central Asia's most populous state with over 25 million. In Kyrgyzstan the figure was 4,000 (0.1 percent) and in Tajikistan it stood at 4,900 (0.1 percent). UNAIDS does not have figures for Turkmenistan, the region's most reclusive state.