Injection Drug Users: Existence Of The HIV Crisis

HIV/AIDS: Trends in Migration/ Trafficking

Bangladesh is still a low prevalence country (HIV-infection rate is less than 1%), but there is a potential for expanding HIV/AIDS epidemic in the future, because the country is very receptive to HIV infection. The receptivity is due to increasing trend of prostitution, domestic and international migration, urbanization, poverty, and proximity to areas with advances epidemics and sexual permissiveness or high-risk sexual behavior of members of certain groups of people. HIV infection and AIDS cases in IDUs tend to increase within last two years.

AIDS has become a global crisis. As of the end of 2005, an estimated 42 million people worldwide - 38 million adults and about 3 million children younger than 15 years - were living with HIV/AIDS. Approximately two-thirds of these people live in Sub-Saharan Africa; another 18 percent live in Asia and the Pacific. The pandemic kills millions, destroys families and communities and renders millions of children parentless. It threatens the social and economic fabric of many nations.

HIV/AIDS Prevalence Rates in Asia

Derivation Grounds of HIV/AIDS in Bangladesh

In 1987, Pakistan was reported first HIV/AIDS case in Lahore. During the late 1980s and 1990s, it became evident that an increasing number, mostly men, were becoming infected with HIV while living or traveling abroad.

The connection of HIV/AIDS with humanitarian crises is creating troubling new problems for all over the world. By the end of 2006, about more or less 39.5 million people worldwide were livings with HIV/AIDS, 90% of them in poor and developing countries. During 2006 alone, a total of 4.3 million adults and children were found to be newly infected with HIV, and in the same year, 2.9 million people died from HIV/AIDS - 85% of them Africans. In two decades, AIDS has killed almost 30 million people and orphaned over 14 million children.

Worldwide, rates of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) among adolescents are soaring: one-third of the 340 million new STDs/STI each year occur in people under 25 years of age. Each yearly, more than one in every 20 adolescents contracts a curable STDs/STI. More than half of all new HIV infections occur in people between the ages of 15 to 24 years. The sexual health needs for adolescent girls are generally overlooked, Stigma and vulnerability affects particular groups of men as well as women. Although men generally have more access to information on sexual issues than women, and more decision-making power regarding sexual behavior, Access to information, and treatment for other infections which facilitate the transmission of HIV and onset of AIDS, including STDs/STI, are limited because of weak public health services, health workers’ negative attitudes, and the high cost of treatment.

Lately, prompted by the concern over the spread of HIV/AIDS, commercial sex workers have been the focus of a great deal of attention, first and foremost with the aim of promoting safe sex as a method of preventing disease. Even with the many groups active among sex workers, and despite the government’s obvious interest in the matter, there has been no correct consideration of the total number of people practicing the profession in Bangladesh. Rough estimates propose that there are well over half million sex workers in the country, with the district of Dhaka, Chitagong, Khulna, and Shilet being considered “vulnerable zones of HIV/AIDS”.