Transcript
It was the poster child of issues confronting PNG ten years ago. But since then it's faded from public discourse, as other problems like corruption took precedence. However, during this time PNG's HIV prevalence has been climbing. UNAIDS' Country Director Stuart Watson says that from a prevalence rate of 0.7 percent in 2015, estimates released last week put it at 0.91%.
"Contrary to the trends in many parts of the world, unfortunately in Papua New Guinea, which does have roughly 95 percent of the epidemic burden in the Pacific region, is trending in the wrong direction. So in PNG, those figures translate into just under 47,000 people living with HIV or an increase in roughly 3000 new infections in the last year, of which nearly a quarter were children and youths."
Coupled with chronic shortages of anti-retroviral medicines and resourcing shortfalls in public health services, many of those infected are not getting treatment, and treatment is prevention. The old ABC approach to HIV prevention of "Abstinence, Being faithful to partners, and Condom use" has not been effective enough in the affected populations including men with multiple partners, female sex workers and wealthy businessmen. Research into male circumcision by Engan academic Rachael Tommbe at James Cook University in Cairns is coming into consideration.
"There is a relationship between regions where there is some sort of foreskin cutting in PNG, there's a relationship between HIV prevalence. Those people who have some sort of cutting in place, the regions have lower HIV prevalence than those regions who don't have any cutting in place."
The National AIDS Council's Manager for Research Tony Lupiwa says cuts in government funding meant HIV awareness has slowed down in recent years. But with elections approaching, the Council is preparing for a fresh drive.
"In the past we have had increased number of cases after the elections, because (at) election time people are moving into the areas where the intending candidates are, and there's a lot of money and beer and drugs that result in unsafe sex."
Stuart Watson says for the last five years or so, around 3-quarters of financial resources for PNG's HIV response has come from donors, primarily Australia, but also New Zealand, the European Union and the UN.
"Now over the last year there's been quite a serious decline as pressure on donors for a number of the crises underway around the world has meant that Papua New Guinea has seen less and less money for the national response and as a result we're just not abel to keep up with the demand and the rapidly growing population, and issues and problems in the health system in general in PNG."
PNG has a goal of providing 90 percent of HIV patients with anti-retroviral drugs by 2020 - currently it's at around 55 percent. It will be a steep challenge, given the dearth of resources for public health in PNG.
