Philippines - Spread of HIV virus continues unabated in Philippines

With a 50 percent increase in new HIV infections over the past 10 years and decreasing local and foreign funding for anti-Aids programmes, the Philippines is a "long way" from meeting its sixth Millennium

Development Goal - halting and reversing the spread of the dreaded disease - by 2015, according to the country coordinator of the United Nations Programme on HIV-Aids (UNAIDS).

Teresita Marie Bagasao, head of the Manila office of UNAIDS, urged the country to "dramatically scale up its HIV-Aids prevention efforts so it could fulfill its MDG commitment."

"With decreasing external resources, the Philippines needs to mobilise domestic resources to get ahead of the epidemic. The country also has to focus on where the disease is, as well as do things faster, smarter and better based on evidence of what works," Bagasao told the Inquirer.

Funding for anti-HIV-Aids programmes "needs to be four times (P1.76 billion) more than the current level (about P440 million per year) to achieve universal... goals," she said.

"Eighty percent of resources for Aids response is external, mainly from the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria. However, the current Global Fund grant will come to an end in November 2012. The programme may start accepting new funding proposals by late 2013 or early 2014. This means that the country's resource gap will even be greater," Bagasao pointed out.

The Philippines has obtained at least $20.4 million (about P890 million) in grants from the Global Fund to boost its not-so-successful "Getting to Zero" campaign against HIV-Aids.

The top recipients of Global Fund releases were Ethiopia ($560 million), India ($385 million) and Tanzania ($364 million), as well as Southeast Asian countries like Thailand ($174 million), Cambodia ($111 million), Indonesia ($85 million), and Vietnam ($27 million), among others.

Exacerbated by the "underfunding, if not unfunding" of anti-HIV-Aids programmes, current efforts by both the public and private sectors are not enough to reverse Department of Health estimates of a five-fold increase in new HIV infections in the next five years.

"If current efforts remain at the same level, there will be 30,000 to 45,000 cases of HIV in the country by 2015," Bagasao warned.

From an estimated 600 HIV cases in 2001, some 4,600 new infections were monitored last year by the DOH.

"New HIV infections in the country, which have been expanding since 2009, are concentrated among men who have sex with men, people who inject drugs and sex workers," said the UNAIDS official.

She disclosed that "the vast majority of people living with HIV are based in three highly urbanised metropolitan areas: Metro Manila, Metro Cebu and Metro Davao."

However, "new HIV infections are also reported in other areas in the country and even among overseas Filipino workers."

Since 1984, some 3,700 Filipinos, including an estimated 500 in 2010, have died of Aids-related causes, noted Bagasao.

The human immuno-deficiency virus, or HIV, leads to Aids, or acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a condition in which the body's immune system is attacked, weakened and disabled by the virus, ultimately leading to death. HIV is transmitted mainly through sex or blood transfusion.

Earlier, UNAIDS disclosed that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the most alarming, the HIV-Aids problem in the Philippines was "5 nationally." But it was "already 8 to 9 in specific sites mainly associated with officially reported HIV prevalence."

In a 2010 Global Aids report released by UNAIDS, the country was one of seven nations in the world which reported over 25 percent increases in new HIV infections whereas other states had either stabilised or shown significant declines in the rate of new infections.

Among all countries in Asia, only the Philippines and Bangladesh were reporting increases in HIV cases, with others either stable or decreasing, the UN-attached agency also reported.

By Jerry E. Esplanada

Inquirer.net

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