HIV prevention in Asia

Asia has been the base for some extremely successful large-scale HIV prevention programmes. Well-funded, politically supported campaigns in Thailand and Cambodia have led to significant declines in HIV-infection levels, and HIV prevention aimed at sex workers and their clients has played a large role in these achievements. In Tamil Nadu, India, HIV prevention initiatives have had a substantial impact. High-profile public campaigns discouraged risky sexual behaviour, made condoms more widely available, and provided STI testing and treatment for people who needed them. These efforts resulted in a large decline in risky sex.¹⁰

Successes such as these prove that interventions can change the course of Asia's AIDS epidemics. As HIV infection rates continue to grow however, it's clear that more needs to be done. The groups most at risk of becoming infected – sex workers, IDUs, and MSM – are all too often being neglected. For instance, although injecting drug use is one of the most common HIV transmission routes in Asia, it is estimated that less than one in ten IDUs in the region have access to prevention services.¹¹ Similarly men who have sex with men are overlooked and poorly monitored by most governments, even though it is firmly established that this group play a significant role in some countries’ epidemics

It is not only legal barriers that are preventing people from accessing effective HIV prevention; problems also arise when prevention programmes do not contain information that will be most useful. For example, young people in Asia are generally not taught about the kinds of behaviours that put this group most at risk: unprotected sex through sex work, injecting drug use, and sex between men. Instead they focus on heterosexual transmission and reproductive health, which have a limited impact on preventing new HIV infections among young people in Asia.¹⁴

The coverage of prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) services is also very low in Asia. In East, South and South-East Asia, around 12% of pregnant women were offered an HIV test in 2008 - a very low percentage compared to other regions of the world such as Europe and Central Asia (65%) and sub-Saharan Africa (28%).¹⁵ In 2008 across East, South and South-East Asia, only 25% of HIV-infected pregnant women received ARVs to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.¹⁶

See our HIV prevention around the world page for more about efforts to stem the spread of HIV in Asia and other parts of the world.

Due to the stigma that often surrounds those groups most at risk of HIV infection, coverage of HIV voluntary counselling and testing (VCT) services in South-East Asia remains very low. An estimated 0.1% of the adult population in the region received testing and counselling in 2005.¹⁷ Certain countries are making progress, however; testing services in India have been expanded with about 3600 testing centres now open to the public.¹⁸ Even so, far more needs to be done across Asia to ensure VCT is available to those most at risk of acquiring HIV.