Ignorance is main driver

In much of the rest of the world, the news from the HIV frontline is encouraging. There is cause for guarded optimism in studies by the international monitoring agency UNAIDS that found out, for instance, that “the global rate of new HIV infections among adults and children has fallen by 33 percent since 2001.” That 2013 report attributed the drop to “improved access and quality of antiretroviral treatments”: “Around 9.7 million people in low- and middle-income countries had access to these life-saving treatments by the end of 2012.” Concerning a particularly vulnerable group, the latest statistics from the agency show that “New HIV infections among children have declined by 50 percent since 2010.” A November 2015 UNAIDS report also said the two million new HIV infections tallied worldwide in 2014–15 were the lowest such figures in 15 years, or since 2000.

Treatments have also improved tremendously since the first onslaught of the disease in the 1980s. An HIV prevention pill is now available in the United States and other countries, while the antiretroviral drug regimen that has been the standard treatment for people living with HIV—allowing them to live generally unimpaired, healthy lives by delaying the onset of AIDS by years, even decades—has been made simpler and more accessible through the years. So successful have been the advances in treatments that, according to a new report in the medical journal Lancet, as quoted by BBC, “Young people on the latest HIV drugs now have near-normal life expectancy because of improvements in treatments… Twenty-year-olds who started antiretroviral therapy in 2010 are projected to live 10 years longer than those first using it in 1996.”

But the key to living longer, healthier lives despite HIV should be clear, doctors said. It’s early treatment, preferably as soon as a person is diagnosed, which makes it imperative that people get themselves tested regularly, especially those from high-risk groups. A January 2017 report by the NGO Kaiser Family Foundation points out: “Most infections are transmitted heterosexually, although risk factors vary. In some countries, men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, sex workers, transgender people, and prisoners are disproportionally affected by HIV.”

It should alarm the Philippine government that while HIV infections are on the decline in many parts of the world, in Asia, only two countries continue to post higher numbers: Afghanistan and the Philippines. March 2017 was a new record month, according to the Department of Health, with 968 new cases—the highest figure recorded in a month since 1984, and 32 percent higher than the 735 cases recorded in the same period in 2016.

A further worry is that, as the National Youth Commission put it last November, HIV in the country has become a “youth epidemic,” citing statistics showing that in 2016, 62 percent of new HIV cases were among young people between
15 and 24 years old. Ignorance appears to be the main driver; the DOH admits that only 17 percent of youth aged 15-24 understand what HIV is and how it spreads.

If other countries are having greater success in the fight against HIV, what is the Philippines missing out on? Where are the aggressive awareness and prevention campaigns that should make noise at this point to correct the situation and arrest the further spread of the epidemic?

Thailand, for one, has been a success story in battling HIV through thorough information drives and condom distribution. Here, unfortunately, the Department of Education just recently caved in to conservative groups and dropped a plan to distribute condoms to senior high school students and talk to them, as well as their parents and teachers, about sexual health.

The country is in the midst of a public-health emergency; it is clear that less rigid thinking and more radical intervention is urgently needed.