Aids education: "We must change public opinion"
08/11/2007
This update on Kazakhstan was part of a review of our plans there to launch a program around our villages. We thought it was interesting for people to be able to read the report online.
Although the number of HIV positive persons in Kazakhstan is not very high, according to specialists the biggest problem is public attitude.
Epidemiologist Lolita Ganina from the Republic Centre for AIDS Prevention and Control admits that discrimination and public attitude toward HIV positive persons is very bad. "No matter what social awareness campaigns we run, we can't break it yet. But we must change it"
Maria Plotnikova of the HIV/AIDS prevention centre in Almaty supports this opinion, saying that society's general attitude is that the infected people are guilty themselves. "We have cases where even medics have declined to serve the infected persons; so it's quite natural that nobody wants to speak about the illness publicly," says Plotnikova, and warns that people are too careless.
"One of the problems is also that people think that it has nothing to do with them. But the reality is that five years ago we had ten cases of HIV/AIDS. We now have 500 cases in Almaty and the trend is continuing."
Infection among pregnant women
Plotnikova says that for the last three years, the relative growth of infected persons in Almaty has been 10% per year. In the summer of 2007 there are approximately 1600 HIV positive persons in the city.
"The majority of them, over 80%, are injecting drug users. The most worrying trend is that the number of infections is growing among pregnant women," she tells.
This is not only the case in Almaty - for the last three years the trend has been that more new cases have been the result of sexual intercourse, not of needle sharing, says Ganina. "More and more women are infected; a few years ago there 15% of infected people were women and 85% were men, now we have 25% women."
Lack of information
The city's HIV/AIDS centre is trying to do preventive work; especially among youngsters. "In every district of the city there is a special person whose responsibility it is to educate teachers, who will then carry the information to the youngsters."
Lack of information is, according to Plotnikova, the biggest problem in society. "We have done a survey among persons who come to Almaty to work as sex-workers and ignorance rules." 60% of the sex-workers are not from the city and therefore lack education and information on HIV/AIDS.
Young girls living in Kazakh villages do not receive sex education. They come to the bigger cities to find a job and often end up working as prostitutes.
More cases than in neighbouring countries
Officially there are approximately 8000 HIV/AIDS cases in the country; including 160 cases of children under the age of 14 - a direct effect of the infamous case in the southern part of the country, where 118 babies were infected in the hospital by accident.
The official number of HIV positive persons is 0.2% of the total inhabitants. Although there are countries with worse situations, Kazakhstan stands out in the region - it has more cases of HIV/AIDS than its neighbouring countries. However, as the economical situation is improving, specialists hope that the trend is slowing down among youngsters.
The estimated number of HIV positive persons is 15000: 75% of them are men; 80% are in the age group 20-39; and 72% have neither job nor home. The potential for continued rapid spread among injecting drug users (and then further spread among other groups in society) is acute. There are 43000 registered drug users and the estimated number is five times greater.
Two places most affected by HIV/AIDS are the Almaty and Karaganda regions (in both regions there is an SOS Children's Village). Karaganda was the first hotbed of HIV/AIDS. The only factory in Temirtau was closed down and the usual circle started - unemployment, drugs, HIV/AIDS.
From the little town of Temirtau, the disease has spread itself to the bigger cities, especially to Almaty, the former capital, that officially has 1.2 million inhabitants, but in reality twice as many. These are mostly people from the countryside in search of work.
Relevant Countries: Kazakhstan.