Suvendrini Kakuchi
For Padma, a sociology graduate from a Sri Lankan university, the three-day International
Congress on AIDS in Asia and the Pacific (ICAAP) that ended Thursday was nothing short of
an enlightening experience in her life.
“When I arrived at the conference, I was filled with fear and prejudice against people with
HIV and AIDS. But now, I hold a totally different view. Thanks to the large amount of
information available to me here, I no longer fear eating with or using the toilets that have
already been visited by positive people,” she explained.
Padma, who declined to give her last name, says she leaves the Aug. 19-23 conference,
where she worked as a volunteer with other Asian activists and HIV-positive people for the
first time in her life, with a firm decision in her mind.
“I am now determined to do something to spotlight HIV among young people here. The
conference has made me want to start my own organisation to change the narrow
perception among people in Sri Lanka,” she told TerraViva.
Padma is not the only one. Experts at the conference, the largest in Sri Lanka, agree that
the most significant achievement of the congress has been its being a much-needed
public platform to raise awareness about the epidemic in this South Asian country where
the trend has been to shrug it off given the officially reported low rates of HIV
prevalence.
Violet Maldeniya, an official at the Education Ministry in charge of counselling in primary
schools, said:“I attended as many sessions as I could at ICAAP and I gained a great
amount of knowledge that I need to put to practice to protect people here.”
Sri Lanka has an HIV prevalence rate of 0.1 percent in a population of 20 million. Up to
June 2007, 886 persons had been diagnosed as HIV-positive, official figures say, although
estimates of the number of people living with HIV was 4,500 at end-2005.
But experts cautioned that there exists a tinderbox situation, one that points to the risks
and challenges ahead.
A telling example lay in the closing comments by Prof. A H Sheriffdeen, one of the three
co-chairs of ICAAP who told the audience of the difficulty he faced in asking companies to
donate 10,000 condoms to congress participants. He attributed the companies’
unwillingness to the lack of public awareness of the pandemic.
Adding to what many participants found a letdown were the comments of Healthcare
and Nutrition Minister Nimal Siripala de Sila who, in his address to close ICAAP, declared
that the government policy on HIV is to push family values — having one sexual partner —
“as the best form of protection”.
Other pressing issues for the country, according to experts, include maintaining the
state health budget given the expanding national military budget.
The amount of resources put into the military is rationalised as being necessary to face
the long drawn-out ethnic conflict here and to provide resources for a grassroots
approach to HIV prevention — programmes to boost almost non-existent sex education in
schools, psychological and economic support in the form of livelihoods for people living
with HIV, and increasing testing facilities for the public.
Still, as Joe Thomas, a leading researcher on the pandemic, pointed out, ICAAP has also
jumpstarted Sri Lanka’s efforts toward HIV prevention. This is yet another sign of much-
needed global progress, the primary role of these large international gatherings.
“ICAAP is a golden opportunity for countries such as Sri Lanka and for the rest of Asia,
where the epidemic has reached a stage where it needs to be molded to face the issues in
this region and build a road map where donors and Asian countries can cooperate based
on the needs on the ground,” he said.
According to UNAIDS, between 2.8 and 9.8 million people were living with HIV in the
Asia-Pacific in 2006. (END/IPSAP/TerraViva/SK/LLC/JS/07)