Labour migration source of concern for HIV/AIDS

Labour migration could fuel the spread of HIV/AIDS in impoverished Tajikistan where upwards of 600,000 people migrate abroad each year in search of work, a UNAIDS official told IRIN on Thursday. "The migrant population has more risk of getting infected and that's one of the target groups," Dr Rick Adamian, Central Asia coordinator for UNAIDS told IRIN from the Kazakh commercial capital, Almaty. Among those considered more vulnerable to sexually transmitted infections (STIs) or HIV/AIDS were intravenous drug users, commercial sex workers (CSWs), homosexuals, displaced people and street kids, he said. Earlier this month, Azim Mirzoyev, head of the Tajik National AIDS prevention centre in the capital, Dushanbe, issued a similar warning. "Until recently HIV sufferers were mainly injecting drug addicts, but among them now are labour migrants. Most are people who have gone to former Soviet republics for better earning opportunities," the Russian ITAR-TASS news agency quoted him as saying on 3 June. Since 1991, 228 cases of HIV/AIDS have been registered, 109 of them in the first four months of 2004, Mirzoyev told IRIN in a separate interview. But accurate information - either serological or behavioural - has yet to be sourced on the issue of labour migrants, Adamian noted, adding nobody could say with accuracy whether they had been infected in Russia or Kazakhstan, the primary destination countries for labour migrants, or in Tajikistan itself. "We know that there are STIs in remote villages and there is such a problem with STIs," he maintained, where a male partner often leaves to work abroad for six to seven months and returns. And while a prevalence study has been done, it has yet to be determined conclusively how, and from where, the infection stemmed, he added. According to a draft of the strategic programme to fight HIV/AIDS epidemics of the Tajik Ministry of Health for 2004 to 2010, the main mode of HIV transmission in Tajikistan remains intravenous drug usage. Other factors causing the spread of HIV-infection, relate to the growth in the number of CSWs, unemployment, poverty, high migration rates, as well as a low level of awareness of HIV among the population. "The most vulnerable group on HIV for Tajikistan is [the] migrating population, labour migrants," the draft claimed. During their work abroad, contact with CSWs, or their involvement in the same business, and drug abuse, could fuel the spread of HIV and other STIs. "Returning home, they infect their wives," the draft maintained, noting a recent report by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) which positively confirmed some 10 percent of syphilis cases in one region of southern Khatlon province had been found among members of migrant families. Migrants were not only vulnerable themselves, but also a vehicle for HIV spreading to the general population, it warned, adding it was believed that STIs and HIV among labour migrants and their partners would be much higher than the general population.