Materia Medica Malaysiana

Ill-prepared to stop a growing AIDS epidemic

NEW YORK: There are only about 10 doctors throughout Malaysia who have significant experience treating HIV/AIDS and the country will be ill-prepared to thwart a growing epidemic, with indications that the infection rate is going up.

According to a report in the latest issue of TREAT Asia Report, a quarterly newsletter published by the American Foundation for AIDS Research on behalf of TREAT Asia (Therapeutics Research, Education, and AIDS Training in Asia), the rate was rising, especially among injection drug users and female sex workers in urban areas.

The report said that presently, compared with many South-East Asian countries, Malaysia, however, had a relatively low prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

UNAIDS (Joint United Nations programme on HIV/ AIDS) in 2001 estimated that only 0.4% of the adult population was infected with HIV and about 42,000 people were living with HIV/AIDS.

The quarterly featured the University Malaya Medical Centre’s (UMMC) infectious disease unit as a premier referral service for HIV/AIDS patients in Kuala Lumpur and is a participating site in TREAT Asia. The other site in Malaysia is the Kuala Lumpur Hospital.

TREAT Asia is a network of clinics, hospitals and research institutions working to ensure safe and effective delivery of HIV/AIDS treatment in Asia and the Pacific.

Dr Adeeba Kamarulzaman of UMMC, a top health expert on HIV/AIDS, attributed the shortage of experts in Malaysia to doctors tending to shy away from specialising in infectious diseases and opting instead for more lucrative fields like dermatology and ophthalmology.

Another reason was the high level of stigma associated with HIV/AIDS. She said that Malaysians traditionally condemned activities that could lead to the transmission of HIV, including intravenous drug use, premarital, extramarital and homosexual sex, and sexual relations with sex workers.

Dr Adeeba, a member of TREAT Asia’s steering committee, said her unit had three physicians to treat all cases of infectious disease, including HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria and dengue fever.

The unit runs HIV/AIDS-specific programmes three days a week and currently serves about 300 patients, mostly men in their mid-30s showing symptoms of AIDS-related disease like tuberculosis.

While injection drug users represent the majority of the cases, Dr Adeeba said they made up only 15% to 20% of patients who came to the unit. Most of her patients contracted HIV through heterosexual sex.

As part of the TREAT Asia/HIV/AIDS Observational Database, the unit will start to compile anonymous patient data. It hopes to help develop effective national data collection practices and ultimately, effective AIDS prevention and treatment strategies.