Half of Papuans unaware of AIDS: Indonesian report

early half the people in Indonesia's remote Papua region have never heard of
HIV/ AIDS despite having the country's highest prevalence rate of the disease, a government study says.

While 48 percent of Papuans are unaware of AIDS, the number of cases per 100,000 people in Papua is nearly 20 times the national average, said the report, funded by the World Bank, the U.S. government and U.S. organization Family Health International.

"Education on HIV needs to be extended. Education efforts have to target populations at risk, particularly groups with high-risk behavior such as those with multiple sexual partners and who pay for sex," said the report, to be released on Wednesday.

"Prevention services and condom availability have to be improved for the entire Papuan region."

Papua, which lies on the easternmost fringe of the sprawling archipelago of about 17,000 islands, has a population of 2 million, many of them indigenous tribes that still live in virtually Stone Age conditions.

Some 2 percent of the population is infected with the disease and the high prevalence rate in remote mountainous areas is largely due to poor knowledge of the disease and lack of access to condoms among isolated tribes.

Only 5.1 percent of people in mountainous regions know where to find condoms, compared to 34.8 percent living in cities, said the report.

Health experts say the disease has been spreading rapidly due to several factors -- high rates of promiscuity, rituals in some Papuan tribes where partner swapping takes place, poor education about AIDS and a lack of condoms.

The report gave no estimates on cases in Indonesia, but Health Minister Siti Fadilah Supari warned in November that the country could see half a million HIV cases by 2010, and double that if preventive steps are not taken.

At that time, estimates put the number of cases in a range of 169,000-216,000 in Indonesia although only about 7,000 full-blown AIDS cases had been reported.

That represents an overall estimated HIV infection rate of about 0.1 percent of the population.