From www.news.com.au

Global HIV testing 'a failure'
From correspondents in Bangkok
July 10, 2004

GLOBAL testing for HIV has been a failure, with the overwhelming majority of the 38 million people living with the virus unaware they are carriers, experts warned today.

The failure to provide a clear picture of those carrying the virus is hampering efforts to counter its spread, even as health experts warn of an imminent crisis in Asia unless rapid action is taken.

"If over 90 per cent of those who are infected with HIV don't know they are infected, global testing policy has failed," Trevor Neilson, executive director of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS (GBC), told reporters.

"Testing is the missing link. Without it we are undermining prevention," he said, a day before the start of the fifteenth International AIDS Conference in Bangkok.

He said that 500,000 people every day must be tested if a key World Health Organisation goal of treating three million people for HIV in developing countries by the end of 2005 is to be met.






Experts acknowledged that global testing has been a disaster largely because of the unwillingness of people to come forward due to the enormous stigma attached to the disease.

Because the tests are voluntary, only a trickle of people from the developing world, where discrimination is most rife, go for testing.

"The reality is that stigma and discrimination continue to stop people from having an HIV test," the Joint United Nations Program on HIV-AIDS (UNAIDS) said in a statement.

Aggressive new campaigns were needed to ensure more people were tested while governments need to work harder to prevent carriers from being marginalised by society, the GBC said.

Companies also needed to do more and bring in their own routine testing regime for HIV.

"We don't think our companies have done a fraction of what needs to be done," said Neilson.

"Every company in the world has to get involved in the fight against AIDS."

In Botswana – where 37 per cent of the population has HIV, making it one of the world's worst-hit nations – the government has introduced routine testing for HIV with the bold goal of having an HIV-free generation by 2016.

Richard Feachem, executive director of the Global Fund, which provides cash to countries for their own projects to tackle HIV/AIDS, said testing was essential so prevention and treatment could take root.

He said the private sector needed to ensure the cost of testing kits were reduced so developing countries could afford them.

"The prices are falling, and any price we use today will be falling tomorrow," he said.

After a trip to Africa, Richard Holbrooke, former US ambassador to the United Nations and the president of the GBC, wrote in February that "almost no one actually gets tested".

"In general, people do not volunteer even for ordinary tests, let alone a test for a disease that carries with it an enormous social stigma and a virtually certain death sentence," he wrote.

At lot of these countries need to start educating there people at an earlier age... I mean you here about people in Africa who belief that if you have sex with virgins you can cure yourself - what is the world to do if people believe that kind of shit- I would only hope that educating the children would heplp the next generation

How can you teach them about HIV when they still live in fear of Penis Snatchers?

Yeah, that is my worry- but if they can't be taught then they are lost.
Penis snatchers, ha