It's Official: HIV and AIDS Now an Epidemic Among Pinoy MSMs
By Mikee dela Cruz
POSTED DATE: 9 DECEMBER 2008
No beating around the bush.
With 395 new human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) infections among men who have sex with men (MSMs) from January to September 2008 alone, 96% up from 2005’s 210 reported infections, it is now recognized that there is "an ongoing HIV and acquired immune deficiency syndromeor acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) epidemic among the MSM (community)."
Citing the Department of Health’s (DOH) HIV/AIDS Registry, Dr. Eric Tayag, who heads DOH’s National Epidemiology Center (NEC), says (during the Philippine National AIDS Convention, a biannual event of the NGO AIDS Society of the Philippines) that the sudden and steep increase in the number of new cases, particularly in the last three years (309 cases in 2006, and 342 in 2007), is “tremendously in excess of what (is) usually expected,” thus the classifying of the situation as an “epidemic (See Figures 1, 2 and 3).”
Figure 1: HIV AND AIDS CASES IN THE PHILIPPINES (JANUARY 1984 TO SEPTEMBER 2008, N=3,456)
Source: National Epidemiology Center
Figure 2: SEXUAL TRANSMISSION
Source: National Epidemiology Center
Figure 3: MSM TRANSMISSION
Source: National Epidemiology Center
It is difficult to OFFICIALLY declare the situation as such, however, just as the DOH declares malarial or dengue epidemics in severe outbreaks, because of the “gay stigma implicit in (such a declaration).” "We cannot predict the level of stigma and discrimination against MSMs when we link the new findings to them," Tayag says, as quoted by the Philippine Daily Inquirer. "The last thing the (DOH) wants is to label HIV and AIDS as a gay disease."
Elsewhere, HIV has been dubbed as, among others, “gay plague,” because of the relatively bigger number of homosexuals infected with it that led many to erroneously believe it only affects the GLBTQI community. In the Philippines, however, the situation had been the complete opposite – until 2007, heterosexual intercourse was the main mode of transmission (at 61% last year), followed in descending order by homosexual and bisexual relations, mother-to-child transmission, contaminated blood and blood products, and injecting drug use, according to the United States Agency for International development (USAID, usaid.org).
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