Asia's Sex Industry Is Growing Rapidly, Threatening AIDS Efforts, WHO Says

In a report prepared for a conference promoting government condom programs, the World Health Organization (WHO) said today that Asia's sex trade is making efforts to control AIDS more difficult. While Asia has managed to greatly reduce AIDS with prevention programs encouraging condom use, the sex trade's move away from traditional districts and into bars, karaoke parlors and restaurants has made condom distribution more difficult.

Asia's sex trade is expanding because of rising income disparities as the region develops; poverty among women; the increased mobility of people; and an increase in consumerism, the report said. The region's future will depend upon how successfully areas with widespread illegal prostitution can implement condom programs. "It's a matter of accepting reality.

All attempts to eliminate prostitution have failed," said Cris Tunon, the WHO's program officer in Vietnam. "What we have seen in recent years is a change in governments to pragmatic and effective approaches," he said.

An estimated 6 million people in Asia are currently infected with HIV, with 3.9 million in India alone. By 2005, 800,000 Asians are likely to die each year from AIDS, WHO said. WHO recommends that the region follow the example of Thailand and Cambodia which, it said, had used condom programs "to turn the tide of rising HIV by focusing on the main driving force of the epidemic: commercial sex workers and their clients." "If we use the lessons learned in Thailand and Cambodia, we have a real chance to stop the growth of the epidemic in this part of the world," WHO regional director Shigeru Omi said in a statement.

In Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand, the sex industry accounts for an estimated 2 to 14 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), according to WHO. Even in industrialized Japan, its earnings amount to an estimated 1 to 3 percent of GDP.

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