The Official Gays.com Blog

One of the more bizarre headlines to appear this World Aids Day comes out of China, where local authorities in the Yunnan Province have used over $17,000 in public funds to finance the opening of a “gay bar”, where apparently no beverage will be sold. The place, authorities say, will be used to “offer lectures and training to gay people in order to reduce AIDS infections among [gay men]” in the province which has the highest number of HIV/AIDS cases in the country. AIDS activists have expressed their skepticism of what these government officials are doing, while conservatives have started writing in to papers criticising what they see as a waste of taxpayer money and an indirect endorsement of homosexual behaviour. In other big news coming out from the world’s most populous nation, the longstanding ban on visitors with HIV/AIDS may finally be lifted, possibly ahead of next year’s World Expo in Shanghai. Big pragmatic strides for a country that not so long ago blamed foreigners and homosexuals for AIDS.

Meanwhile, the world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia, risks taking a few steps backwards as hardline Muslims marched in cities across the archipelago, urging the “application of syariah in an Islamic caliphate so that, God willing, all of us will be free from the HIV/Aids threat”. Demonstrators urged the government to shut down brothels and to ban condoms, holding up signs that said “Prostitutes, drug users and homosexuals are the agents of immorality.”

Over in Algeria, an NGO has warned that thousands of people are unknowingly infected with HIV. While official health ministry statistics cite 4,084 HIV-positive people and 1,011 people with AIDS, the real figure is somewhere closer to 21,000. The conservative Muslim nation does not offer sex education in schools and young people are not taught about condoms.

Further down south, in Zimbabwe, male soldiers between the ages of 18-29 will undergo voluntary circumcision as part of the government’s rather unusual plan to curb the spread of HIV. A UNAIDS study in 1999 found a whopping 55 percent of the Zimbabwean army HIV-positive. Four years later, a Zimbabwe Human Development Report found the HIV prevalence in the armed forces remained far above the general population infection rate of 24.6 percent, and 75% of soldiers died of AIDS within a year of leaving the army.

UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibe is in South Africa marking World Aids Day, where 5.7 million people suffer from HIV/AIDS out of a nation of 50 million, and about 1,000 South Africans die of AIDS-related complications every day. “If I am not in South Africa for World AIDS Day, I don’t know where I should be,” said Sidibe. South Africa’s High Court in Pretoria has recently ruled that the military’s exclusion of HIV-positive people from recruitment, promotion and deployment is unconstitutional.

Back in Asia, an HIV/AIDS tragedy is unfolding in Myanmar (Burma) as you read this. The country has an estimated 240,000 people living with HIV/AIDS, but out of the 75,000 people in need of anti-retroviral treatment, just one fifth actually get it. The remainder are just waiting to die. Myanmar’s military junta does not seem to care: It spends half of its budget on defence, and just 0.3% on healthcare.

Next door in India, which accounts for roughly half of Asia’s HIV prevalence, clinical trials for a HIV vaccine are entering their final stages. The number of new infections in the Indian subcontinent has decreased from 400,000 in 2001 to 350,000 in 2008, with a more marked decrease in the southern states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

And finally, UNAIDS and WHO present us with some good news with a report that new HIV infections have fallen 17% worldwide in the past eight years. 2.7 million people were newly infected with HIV while 2.0 million people died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2008. This means that 33.4 million people worldwide now have HIV. The WHO has also changed its HIV drug advice, and urged the use of Stavudine, now the most widely-used anti-retroviral drug because of its low cost, to be phased out in favour of Zidovudine or Tenofovir. This was due to concerns over “long-term, irreversible” side effects of Stavudine in HIV patients that include wasting and a nerve disorder.

Did we miss out anything in this round-up? Share what you know with us in our World AIDS Day group!