Blinding Trust Leads to AIDS Infections

Image courtesy of www.chinadaily.com

Source: www.efluxmedia.com, February 19, 2009

AIDS is just killing China. HIV became the top killer among infectious diseases in China last year when it sent 6,897 people to their graves, Xinhua News Agency reported.

According to data from the Chinese Health Ministry, the number of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) infections doubled to 264,302 from 135,630 in 2005. The huge increase might be due to the fact that the state authorities refused until last year to acknowledge that HIV infections are a serious threat to China’s population.

However, things have changed and now state authorities began addressing the issue. State authorities promised anonymous testing and free testing for the poor and also vowed to fight the discrimination of the HIV positive people.

Nevertheless, Beijing authorities may have shifted their policy towards AIDS, but most Chinese are still reluctant to HIV testing and the number of people infected in China is actually estimated to be much higher than authorities said. According to a government and UNAIDS reported there may be about 700,000 Chinese infected with HIV.

Not only China faces this problem. The whole eastern Asia seems to record higher infection rates when it comes to HIV. In big cities such as Bangkok, the number of gay and bisexual men who are HIV positive grew 30% according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The main cause of infection is unprotected sex between gay men or MSM as researchers call it. The problem seems to be the fact the perception that gay men have about using a condom when having sex and not the lack of condoms.

“There’s this perception of gay men and MSM throughout the region that if you use a condom you don’t trust your partner,” said Edmund Settle, a HIV-AIDS policy specialist with the United Nations Development Program.

In China, nearly 5% of gay or bisexual men have HIV, while just 0,1% of all adults are HIV positive, according to Wu Zungyou, head of China’s national center for AIDS control and prevention.

My comment: The perception that using a condom seems to suggest a lack of trust of one's partner arises from a deeper, misleading sense that if someone says he or she is HIV negative, then indeed that is true. Even in the US, that attitude is still prevailing, one that has led to tragic infections. HIV education campaigns rarely talk about these intangibles, those unspoken fears. It is time that more concentrated efforts are made to discuss these self-deceptive behaviors.