Prevalence
The country faces a concentrated epidemic, and its very low HIV-prevalence rate is partly due to prevention efforts, focusing on men who have sex with men, female sex workers, and intravenous drug users. Four years before the disease’s 1989 appearance in the country, the government implemented numerous prevention efforts targeting the above high-risk populations as well as migrant workers. Although these activities have helped keep the incidence of HIV down, the number of HIV-positive individuals has increased steadily since 1994 to approximately 7,500 people in 2005 according to the International Center for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh. UNAIDS estimates the number to be slightly higher at 11,000 people.
Whilst HIV prevalence is very low in the general population, amongst Most At Risk Populations (MARPs) it rises to 0.7%. In some cases it is as high as 2.7%, for instance among casual sex workers in Hili, a small border town in northwest Bangladesh. Many of the estimated 11,000 people living with HIV are migrant workers. The 2006 National AIDS/STD programme estimated that 67% of identified HIV positive cases in the country were returnee migrant workers and their spouses. This is similar to findings from other organisations. According to the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (ICDDR, B), 47 of 259 cases of people living with HIV during the period 2002-2004 were identified during the migration process. Other data from 2004 (from the National AIDS/Sexually Transmitted Disease (STD) programme of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare (MoHFW)) shows that 57 of 102 newly reported HIV cases were among returning migrants.
While HIV prevalence among male homosexuals and sex workers has remained below 1 percent, unsafe practices among drug users, particularly needle sharing, have caused a sharp increase in the number of people infected. Measurements at one central surveillance point showed that between 2001 and 2005, incidence of HIV in IDUs more than doubled – from 1.4 percent to 4.9 percent, according to UNAIDS. In 2004, 9 percent of IDUs at one location in Dhaka were HIV-positive. Compounding the risk of an epidemic, a large proportion of IDUs (up to 20 percent in some regions) reported buying sex, fewer than 10 percent of whom said they consistently used a condom.
Read more about this topic: HIV/AIDS In Bangladesh
Famous quotes containing the word prevalence:
“That the public can grow accustomed to any face is proved by the increasing prevalence of Keith’s ruined physiognomy on TV documentaries and chat shows, as familiar and homely a horror as Grandpa in The Munsters.”
—Philip Norman, British author, journalist. The Life and Good Times of the Rolling Stones, introduction (1989)
“The prevalence of suicide, without doubt, is a test of height in civilization; it means that the population is winding up its nervous and intellectual system to the utmost point of tension and that sometimes it snaps.”
—Havelock Ellis (1859–1939)