Male sex sending HIV out of control in Asia - group

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AIDS is “spiraling out of control” in Asia among men who have sex with other men, activists warned on Tuesday - and the epidemic is likely to spread because many of these men also marry or have sex with women.

And because the issue of homosexual sex is taboo in many Asian cultures, these men are difficult to identify and reach through public health campaigns, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, or AmFAR, and a group called TREAT Asia said in a joint report.

“Unless we address male to male sex and HIV risks and vulnerability, it is going to have a major impact on the general population because a lot of the people we work with are also married,” said Shivandanda Khan of Naz Foundation International, a non-governmental organization that works with men who have sex with men (MSM) in India.

"In our culture it is also compulsory to get married. They have no choice,” Khan told a news conference.

Many men who have sex with men are often married, the report said. For instance, 80 percent of men who admit to having sex with other men in China say they are married or plan to get married.

And many of the men have dangerously false beliefs about sexual health, the report said. Up to half of the men in some areas have never used a condom, the report said.

“A lot of men in Asia believe that anal sex is safer than vaginal sex,” Khan said in an interview.

While in Western countries gay groups have been active in fighting the AIDS epidemic, the “gay identity” is not dominant among Asian men who have sex with other men, the report said.

Because of that, the advocacy pioneered by gay communities in the Western world over the past 25 years does not work in Asia, where men who have sex with other men are “invisible” and difficult to identify, the report said.

“In Africa, Latin America, Asia the current rates of HIV infections among men who have sex with men are really spiraling out of control,” said Kevin Frost, AmFAR’s vice president for global initiatives.

“The truth is, we shouldn’t be in this position. We really cannot afford to relearn the lessons of the past 25 years in many parts of the world, in the developing world, particularly around MSM issues.”

Public health experts use the term “men who have sex with men,” or MSM, because many of these men are not strictly homosexual or even bisexual. The report gives some examples of why from Asia.

For instance, it says, 65 percent of MSM in Nepal have regular sex with females, and 45 percent of male sex workers have sex with women as well as with men.

It said 22 percent of MSM in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh city have sex with women as well as men.

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