Materia Medica Malaysiana

Mahathir's daughter in AIDS fight

Extending rights and education for women and giving them choices in their lives is one way the fight against AIDS is being waged in Malaysia, Marina Mahathir said yesterday.

Ms Mahathir, a columnist and president of the Malaysian AIDS Council, is a daughter of Malaysia's former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad.

She said that knowing about the risks associated with AIDS was not sufficient to change behaviour in women.

Women, particularly young women, were the focus of efforts to reduce an increasing rate of diagnosed HIV-positive cases in her country, she said.

Although women comprised fewer than 1000 of the 57,000 reported cases, their rate of infection was increasing faster than for males, Ms Mahathir said.

At the same time, echoing the experience of other countries plagued by AIDS, the indications were that the virus in Malaysia was starting to move out of the drug population - accounting for 72 per cent of HIV-positive cases - and into the general population, she said.

Ms Mahathir, who also produces a television health program aimed at young women, is one of the speakers at the World Conference on Health Promotion and Health Education that opens in Melbourne today.

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"We've done a lot to promote women's rights and options and talk about health because it had been really hard for them to get realistic information," she said.

"For a long time a lot of women had no idea that they were at all vulnerable. We tried to open their eyes to the fact that women are very vulnerable because you really depend on men using condoms so that you don't get infected."

Safe sex was a difficult issue for women to negotiate with their male partners, she said. Although condoms were widely available in Malaysia, there was great reluctance to use them.

"Some people think it is not allowed in our (Muslim) religion or that it doesn't make it pleasurable," she said.

It was a myth that condom use was forbidden for religious reasons, "so we are trying to get the people to understand that there is nothing wrong with it".

One approach was to run training workshops on safe sex for religious leaders, she said.

Ms Mahathir, who is presenting a paper at the health conference on the role of social research in HIV prevention, said Malaysia's Health Ministry provided strong support for the awareness campaign.

But other government agencies had been slow to realise AIDS was not just a medical problem.

The 47-year-old mother of three became involved in the Malaysian AIDS Council, an umbrella group for 37 non-government organisations, after raising funds for AIDS victims 10 years ago.

She found it hard going because people did not really understand the nature of the problem.