My Say
AIDS Scare - It's Now a Reality
It Could Devastate the Pacific Islands
That disease of our time, HIV/AIDS, has so far made surprisingly little impact on the regional consciousness of the Pacific Islands. In Africa and other parts of the world the disease, and how to fight it, is now discussed at regional heads of government level.
It is an issue that has yet to be discussed at the annual Pacific Islands Forum Heads of Government meeting. In March, Pacific Islands health ministers met at Madang in Papua New Guinea for a get together held now every couple of years. The topic that gripped the minds of the medical ministers at Madang was diabetes. This certainly is mushrooming throughout the region as a serious health threat. It is one that can be defeated by a combination of public education, diet, and drugs that don’t cost individuals thousands of dollars a year. Except for public awareness drive, that is not the case with AIDS.
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In the mid 1990s, a World Health Organization (WHO) report warned that AIDS could devastate small Pacific Islands, simply because they are small. Small concentrated populations can easily be made aware of such a risk as AIDS. But they can also become ground for the grip of the disease on a scale ghastly to contemplate.
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A dozen mainly non-government organizations formed to defend the region against the spread of AIDS are of the view that the epidemic predicted by WHO has now arrived. At a United Nations conference in New York in May convened to debate AIDS, the Pacific Islands government delegations were poorly prepared to make a case for international recognition of the fact that if it is not stopped in its tracks, AIDS could devastate their communities even more shockingly than it has ravaged some parts of Africa.
The trouble is that with a few exceptions the accumulation of reported AIDS cases in the region does not seem large; certainly not large enough to frighten governments that have not yet fully woken up to the threat presented by it.
By the end of 2000, according to WHO records, a total of 4,054 cases of HIV and AIDS had been reported in the Pacific Islands out of a total population in the region’s 22 countries and territories of a little over 7 million people. That is a mere 0.057 percent, virtually nothing compared with incidence of malaria, dengue fever, obesity, hypertension and a few other of the region’s nasties.
But that is five-and-a-half times the number in 1999. About 77 percent of all cases have occurred in Papua New Guinea, where the 772 cases of AIDS and 2,342 cases of HIV reported by the end of last year is classed now officially not only as an epidemic but has been described by one authority as being out of control.
The region’s hot spots are New Caledonia with 7.3 percent of the total, French Polynesia with 6.8 percent and Guam with 4.9 percent. Each with about 25 percent of Fiji’s population, the two French territories have three to four times more cases.
But what the experts stress is that the cases are only the reported numbers. Experience shows that there could be five to 10 times more than reported. The five countries where the disease has not so far been reported — American Samoa, the Cook Islands, Niue, Tokelau and Vanuatu — probably do have some lurking somewhere. The record for Kiribati is regarded as being particularly ominous; in a population of about 80,000 people, the number has grown from 4 before 1995 to 49 by the end of last year. AIDS appears to have been introduced by the hundreds of Kiribati men who crew foreign cargo ships and who return home for leave in overpopulated Tarawa.
By now all Pacific Islands countries have official anti-AIDS health programs. But warning notices erected here tend to be battered and faded. That, unfortunately, now seems to be a reflection of the state of the region’s counter-attack against the disease.
In Australia and New Zealand, the number of new cases reported annually is decreasing significantly due to intense public education drives and the introduction of highly active anti-retroviral therapy. Even in Africa, where the human and economic toll taken by AIDS in some countries is truly shocking, the rate of new infections has stabilized at about 3.8 million a year. But that is 3.8 million people doomed. Africa cannot afford the costly medical treatment, US$5,000 to US$10,000 a year, which is available. Nor can Pacific Islanders, as those treatments are not a cure, only a delay.
Pacific Islands governments, nationally and regionally, must without delay adopt and implement a head-on attack against AIDS. The Forum meeting at Nauru in August is the place for such a decision. Further delay will be disastrous, as Papua New Guinea can attest and Kiribati may be doomed to discover.
Illustration: Eyewire
