Jakarta – National AIDS Commission secretary Nafsiah Mboi expressed concern Friday over the increasing number of housewives being infected with HIV/AIDS.
"We currently are finding more housewives infected with HIV/AIDS as compared to sex workers," Nafsiah told a media briefing on the upcoming National Interfaith War Against HIV/AIDS Meeting to be held here Monday.
The AIDS commission's September 2006 bulletin reported that more than 43 percent of HIV infections in Papua occurred among women who were not sex workers.
From 2002 to 2004, the number of infected housewives reported in Papua was higher than the number of infected sex workers. In 2002 for example, 24 percent of those reported with HIV/AIDS were housewives, as compared to 13 percent who were sex workers, the commission said.
Nafsiah indicated that in 2002, about 60 percent of the between seven and nine million men who used sex services in Indonesia were married. "And we cannot just ignore the fact that the remaining 40 percent are single males that will be married one day. What will happen to their future wives if these men have been unknowingly infected?"
She said an effective way of preventing the spread of the virus would be to introduce the use of female condoms. "I encourage both husbands and wives to use condoms."
She said most families in Papua had responded positively to this suggestion, but added, "It is a bit difficult to encourage the use of condoms between married couples in Java, mostly due to religious reasons."
Female condoms have only been introduced in the six provinces of Java and the two provinces of Papua. They have, however, been widely used in countries such as Uganda, Zimbabwe and Thailand.
According to data from the Directorate General of Communicable Disease Control and Environmental Health at the Health Ministry, by March this year, there had been 8,988 new AIDS cases reported in the country's 32 provinces for 2007.
In 2006, AIDS cases had been reported in all provinces in the country, with the number of reported cases reaching more than 193,000. Jakarta topped the list with 26,805 reported cases, followed by Papua with 21,487 cases, East Java with 15,699 cases and West Java with 14,341 cases. Gorontalo was at the bottom of the list with 462 reported cases.
Ninety-four percent of those infected with HIV are between 15 and 49 years of age.
"I found many children in Uganda that had lost both of their parents due to HIV/AIDS infections. Children are those who suffer the most," said the national director of World Vision Indonesia, Trihadi Saptoadi, adding that in that country, next to no people were of a productive age.
"AIDS infections in Asian countries, including India, China, Myanmar, Cambodia and Indonesia, are as serious as in Africa," he said.
Worldwide, around seven million children die of AIDS everyday and some 180,000 more are infected with HIV.
Overall, the number of women infected with HIV/AIDS is rising. This is due not only to sexual activities, but also to the reuse of needles by drug users.
According to Nafsiah, the commission estimated in 2006 that there were 12,780 women living with HIV/AIDS among the 93,420 women who were partners of injecting drug users. It also estimated that there were 5,200 women with AIDS out of the 1,813,880 women who were the regular partners of men who frequented sex workers.
Some 46 percent of people living with HIV/AIDS are injecting drug users, 15 percent are sex worker clients, 10 percent are female and male sex workers, 7 percent are partners of injecting drug users and 3 percent are partners of sex clients.