Cambodia continues to combat AIDS/HIV in 2010

Cambodia continues to combat AIDS/HIV even successful in recent years


Cambodia’s health ministry announced on June 29 that even the ministry got the success of fighting against AIDS/HIV in the country but it has continued to its work regularly to prevent and educate about dangers of deadly disease.

Speaking at a follow-up workshop on AIDS/HIV in Phnom Penh, Teng Kunthy, secretary general of National AIDS Authority said in recent years, even we have been successful in fighting against AIDS/HIV in the country but we have many things to prevent this disease not to recover. “Therefore we need to join from all stakeholders to contribute to education and prevention to avoid infection,” he said, adding that we need all sides to jointly deal dangers of illness. “The decline of Cambodia in HIV prevalence was due to a quick and coordinated response by the government in collaboration with non-governmental organizations and civil society. Infections among direct and indirect sex workers fell after the promotion of 100% condom use. “In 1997, number of aids/HIV infected people was about 3 per cent and in 2007, it was about 0.8 per cent, and it should be lower than this after prevention and education and it continued to drop its infection rate,” he added.

At the event, Heng Sopheab, director of strategic information of KhANA, a leading Cambodian NGO alliance in response to AIDS/HI said, “We all are trying to build national understanding of MSM, enhance advocacy and institutional capacity building, and improve the quality of increase coverage of targeted and comprehensive HIV prevention with MSM. At the same time, he added that all stakeholders contribute helping MSM to access to quality HIV and sexual transmitted illness treatment, care and support services and information.

“We also focus on quality and accessibility of integrated services, support, and referral of illicit drug use related to HIV/AIDS harms. We joined with health ministry and other organizations to develop, strengthen and improve national understanding and response to HIV and drug use,” he added. In 2009, we have network of 16,686 MSM and 90 per cent of MSM who exposed to HIV prevention intervention. “We also continue to advocate for elimination of social stigma and discrimination on them,” he noted.

He continued that Cambodia is one of the few countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of halting and reversing the spread of HIV, with prevalence falling from 3% in 1997 to 0.8% in 2007. This is a major achievement especially given high levels of poverty and inequality, devastation of infrastructure during decades of war and heavy reliance on foreign aid. “The main mode of HIV transmission remains heterosexual sex, but many infections also occur among injecting drug users and men who have sex with men. Poverty, gender inequality and changes in sexual behavior continue to drive the epidemic,” he said, adding that there is a need for more prevention services for couples and key populations including young people, men who have sex with men, injecting drug users, amphetamine-type substance users, park-based sex workers and truck drivers.

Leng Mongneath, national coordinator of National MSM Network said that today we have 20,000 MSM in the country according figure from Non-governmental organizations that worked with MSM. The data of MSM should be more than this because the data we collected is from our network only. So for the MSM who do not link with our network we could not collect figure. We focused on three main categories of AIDS/HIV infection including MSM, girls at the entertainment services, and drug users with same meddle and direct sex workers. They are easily infecting with AIDS/HIV,” he said, adding that we are concerned on MSM because they did not use condom when they love partners. Girls at Entertainment services understand clearly about AIDS/HIV infection. They could prevent this illness but we all still helped them to pursue their partners to use condom to avoid infecting aids. In Cambodia, according to my observation, we succeeded in fighting AIDS/HIV but we concerned about the new wave after the economic crisis, and local authorities also cracked down regularly on brothels, and sex workers. “Where did they go,” he said, adding that we need to join to educate them in fighting against this illness. According to report from national center for HIV/AIDS, dermatology and STD, the number of active patients at the end of quarter of this year are 38,522 who got Anti-retroviral therapy and 20,126 of them are female. And infected people of AIDS/HIV are under 49 years old in working force. ###