HIV infections amongst gays and bisexuals can spin out of control in countries where they are not visible, an authority on the issue says.
Published : 20 Nov 2013, 08:05 PM
Chris Beyrer, a guest editor of last year’s ‘The Lancet’ series on MSMs (men who have sex with men) told bdnews24.com in an interview that these ‘sexual minorities’ are ‘hidden’ in South Asia, “but carry 10 times more HIV infection risk than others”.
“They are not so much in public dialogue and discussions. But the fact is that everywhere we look we see there are substantial MSM populations.
“It does not vary much between countries and cultures. It’s roughly the same,” he said on the sidelines of the ongoing International Congress on AIDS of Asia and the Pacific.
More than 3,000 participants have joined the Congress from 80 countries in the Thai capital.
Beyrer described the MSMs as the ‘key’ population for HIV response for two reasons – higher risk of HIV and lower access to services.
“We have to lower their HIV rates and provide services. We have to deal with their human rights to provide them access to the healthcare in a setting that is safe and where they don't lose out on dignity and where they can disclose their actual behaviour and talk about their partners.
“The country that fails to do that, will face an ongoing epidemic,” he said.
‘Who are MSMs?’
“It’s (MSMs) a behavioural term,” Beyrer, who is the director of the John Hopkins Centre for Public Health and Human Rights, said.
“It does not describe about how people feel whether they are truly gay, whether they are married to women, whether they are attracted to both men and women.
“This is a broad category that include all men who behaviourally have sex with other men, including men sex workers who may be heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual.”
But he said, commonly they share “higher risk of HIV infections and the stigma and discrimination and the limits of access to healthcare”.
‘Hard-to-reach’
Being invisible, there is no official statistics about the number of gays and bisexual men in Bangladesh. But different surveys put the figure at more than 1.5million.
They are criminalised in Bangladesh, according to the UNAIDS latest report that also showed that they are less likely to use condoms than any other high risk groups like sex workers and intravenous drug users.
The condom use rate was only 26 percent, despite the fact that anal unprotected sex is ‘very efficient route’ of transmitting HIV.