Thailand`s Vanishing Condoms

[george]

Thailand`s Vanishing Condoms

(Bangkok) The UN`s AIDS agency in Thailand is expressing alarm over the disappearance of free condoms from gay saunas since the launch of a government AIDS campaign.

Owners of the saunas routinely remove the boxes of condoms from their businesses as quickly as they are delivered. They say that despite the government`s efforts to educate people about AIDS, police still routinely raid bathhouses and the condoms could be used as evidence against them if they were charged with operating sex establishments.

There are 21 gay saunas in Bangkok, many of which have hundreds of patrons every day.

"Anything that hampers access to tools of [HIV/AIDS] prevention jeopardizes the whole program," says Dr Swarup Sarkar, country program development adviser for UN AIDS.

He said UN-AIDS had raised the issue with officials from the Ministry of Public Health and that they were trying to map out a common position on the issue before other ministries and law-enforcement agencies were approached.

The disappearance of condoms from gay saunas comes at a time when the Public Health Ministry is beginning to face up to the AIDS epidemic among gay and bisexual men.

The ministry hopes to have its first-ever HIV/AIDS program for gay and bisexual men up and running before the World AIDS conference begins in Bangkok next July, said Dr Taweesap Siripasiri, adjunct director of the ministry`s collaboration with the US Centres for Disease Control.

The strategy would be among the first of its kind in Asia, where public health officials have been reluctant to address issues relating to gay and bisexual men.

There has been a "universal silence" about the AIDS epidemic among gay men in Asia, said the UN`s Sarkar, but with police in Bangkok anxious to prosecute gay bathhouses, efforts to reach the community are going nowhere.

A pioneering study conducted earlier this year found that 17.3 per cent of gay and bisexual men in Bangkok were HIV positive.

Researchers tested 1,121 men for HIV and interviewed them. They found an alarming rate of unsafe sexual practices, while a significant number of those surveyed said they had had sex with women as well as with men.

Forty-four per cent of the men had had unsafe sex during the preceding six months. More than one third (36 per cent) said they had also had sexual intercourse with a woman or women, 22 per cent of them during the preceding six months.

Most of the men tested were young, with the average age being 26.9 years. Those aged 18 to 22 were nearly twice as likely to be HIV positive.

-- By Peter Hacker, 365Gay.com News centre, Asia Bureau Chief