World bodies warn Bangladesh against feeling complacent

UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, Unicef Executive Director Ann M Veneman and UNAIDS Executive Director Peter Piot jointly launched the campaign in New York yesterday, according to a press release issued by the Unicef in Dhaka yesterday.

'Unite for Children, Unite against Aids' is a global campaign to alert the world to the fact that children are missing from the global Aids agenda. It provides a platform for urgent and sustained programmes including advocacy and fundraising to limit the impact of HIV/Aids on children and help halt the spread of the disease.

Under the campaign, the Unicef and UNAIDS want to achieve the prime goals of preventing mother-to-child HIV transmission, providing paediatric treatment, preventing infection among adolescents and young people and protecting and supporting children affected by HIV/Aids.

Although many countries in Africa and Asia are ravaged by the disease, Bangladesh's prevalence is still low with only 465 confirmed HIV positive cases.

Unicef Bangladesh Represen-tative Louis-Georges Arsenault warned that Bangladesh's low prevalence rate should not let the country slip into a false sense of security.

"Bangladesh has the unique opportunity of being able to act now and prevent the disease. Many countries have lost the battle against HIV/Aids. Bangladesh needs to rise to the challenge and keep the rate low," Arsenault said.

"Information, awareness and prevention are the keys to success in Bangladesh especially among the country's youth which makes up half of the total population," he said.

Recent national surveys have shown that knowledge about the disease is quite low with 40 percent of adolescent boys and 53 percent of adolescent girls reporting that they have never heard of HIV/Aids.

Many of those Bangladeshis who have heard about HIV/Aids still do not know how to avoid the infection. Nearly 15 percent of married women who had heard about Aids did not know if there was any way to prevent it.

In South Asia, there are 110,000 children living with HIV/Aids of which an estimated 30,000 need antiretroviral therapy and 40,000 children are newly infected every year meaning that every day 110 South Asian children are infected.

In the region there are 1.3 million children orphaned by Aids and 125,000 pregnant women who need treatment.

South Asia has some of the fastest growing epidemics of HIV and Aids amongst the groups such as injecting drug users, sex workers and their clients in the world.