Michael Perry, Sydney – Increasing drug use in Asia is accelerating the spread of HIV-AIDS along drug trafficking routes from the so-called Golden Triangle to nations like Indonesia and governments are doing too little to combat it, a report says.

The report on 22 Asian countries, as well as Hong Kong and Macau, said Asian governments were working against the sexual transmission of HIV but they were not doing enough to prevent the virus spreading among injecting drug users.

"Without such action, Asia will continue to be home to what threatens to be amongst the worst regional AIDS epidemics on Earth," said the report by The Centre For Harm Reduction, one of Asia's foremost health and medical research bodies.

Seven million people in Asia live with AIDS or HIV (human immunodeficiency virus), which causes the disease.

The report said Asia had few HIV-AIDS prevention programmes for drug users, such as needle exchanges, and that many drug users shared needles cleaned simply by cold water, not the recommended boiling water or bleach.

"Drug use has become one of the major accelerants of the HIV epidemic in the Asian region," said the report available at the centre's Web site. The centre first issued an Asian HIV-AIDS report in 1997.

"Populations of drug users develop rapidly along trafficking routes, creating new drug markets and HIV threat in host countries," it said.

The report said Indonesia was one of the most at risk with HIV infection due to drug injections rising to 19 percent of the total number of people infected from less than one percent before 2000.

It said by September 2001, there were 2,313 cases of HIV in Indonesia, of which 449 were injecting drug users, adding there were some two million drug users, half of which injected. The report found injecting drug users made up 70 percent of HIV infections in China in 2001 compared with 66 percent in 1997.