IDP camps “blamed” for high HIV infection rates

Concentration of internally-displaced people (IDPs) in camps and promiscuity are to blame for the increasing rate of HIV infection in Burundi’s population, and the camps have become new centres of high infection rates in the countryside, the director of Burundi’s national AIDS and sexually transmitted diseases control programme, Dr. Joseph Wakana, told the Pan-African news agency (PANA) on Monday. However, UN sources disputed Wakana’s claim of “promiscuity” as a cause, noting that HIV rates are higher in IDP and refugee camps worldwide due largely to sexual violence by men against women and breakdown of family structure. “There is widespread rape - people are no longer bound by social conventions,” Damien Rwegera, an adviser for conflict zones in West and Central Africa for the UN AIDS organisation, told Reuters on Tuesday. “The soldiers rape, the men rape - especially as up to 95 percent of people in a refugee camp can be women and children because the men are dispersed.” A UN humanitarian source in Burundi added that seventy percent of households in the country’s IDP camps are headed by women.

Some 380,000 people said to be displaced by the ongoing war in Burundi are living in IDP camps. UNICEF estimates that Burundi had at least 230,000 children orphaned by AIDS last year.

Wakana said AIDS has become the leading cause of mortality among children and adults in the country. In a bid to contain the pandemic, the World Bank made a US $50 million loan to the government of Burundi.

Government funding for the AIDS control programme had never exceeded US $100,000 annually. The UNAIDS office is working with other humanitarian agencies to create an AIDS taskforce to operate in war zones in Africa, a continent that is the world’s most affected both by the pandemic and by displaced populations.
UNAIDS is also working to assist aid workers in conflict zones to rapidly assess AIDS risks and act quickly to combat its spread by means of distribution of condoms and education. “We are not ruling out distributing anti-retrovirals in refugee camps,” Rwegera told Reuters. “MSF has distributed anti-retrovirals to women who have been raped within 72 hours of the rape.”