Sharp increase in new infections alarm Papua New Guinea health
Health authorities in Papua New Guinea are scrambling to revive public campaigns to stop the spread of HIV, after recording a dramatic increase in new infections. After the country successfully contained what some feared would be a catastrophic epidemic of the human virus in the 2000s, the national aids council says the number of new infections has nearly doubled in just one year.
Transcript
00:00 Last year in PNG in 2022 reports, 6,500 new diagnoses were made.
00:11 And that was after about 3,000 the year before.
00:14 And so how concerning is that doubling?
00:18 I think it's not about the doubling in two years.
00:21 It's the fact that since 2020, since 2010, we've seen year on year increases.
00:28 So since 2010, we've had 131% increases from a time when we thought we had reached the
00:36 peak of the AIDS crisis more than a decade ago.
00:40 So to see 6,500 last year is a very serious concern.
00:44 And testing numbers are actually down too.
00:48 We saw in five years ago before COVID, we were seeing 500,000 people a year receiving
00:56 an HIV test, which in this population is still too low, which is an indication of things
01:02 aren't great.
01:04 But when you see that in 2022, you have only 110,000 HIV tests being recorded, 20% on what
01:13 was already not enough, it paints the picture of what's taken a decade to get worse and
01:19 worse and worse.
01:21 And so why is this happening?
01:24 This is a very complex, very complex place.
01:28 So what you've seen since 2010, the world is a completely different place.
01:33 And when you put in place excellent programs for public health, excellent programs for
01:40 primary school education for sexual and reproductive health, hundreds of excellent services for
01:46 voluntary counseling and testing, I'm using the language of 2009.
01:52 But if you don't sustain all of those programs in a competing landscape of climate change,
01:59 environmental activism, equity programs for women, I'm not proud to say that in 2007 and
02:07 six and five, equity programs for women weren't as empowered and weren't as well resourced.
02:14 They are now.
02:15 But I'm afraid all of those other really important development issues have come at the cost of
02:21 keeping the eye on the ball, quite literally, of HIV prevention.
02:28 So what's the chance this could get seriously out of control?
02:32 It already is seriously out of control.
02:35 And so what could happen from here in terms of the numbers over the coming five, 10 years?
02:41 What we're seeing here is in Papua New Guinea, the rest of the world is on a trajectory to
02:47 elimination, and unfortunately, Papua New Guinea is now on the trajectory of only a
02:52 few other countries and the worst in the region, where we're seeing increasing numbers of new
02:59 infections and babies still being born with HIV.
03:03 So it's a matter for every baby born, you're facing a lifetime requirement of testing,
03:09 treatment, viral load monitoring.
03:12 So the resources required to keep somebody alive and healthy and productive become more
03:19 and more expensive every year.
03:21 But that's no different for any other country.
03:24 But where we don't have the resources to fund the national strategy as it currently exists,
03:31 more infections means, by head, fewer resources for all people living with HIV.
03:37 A really important asset in the fight against HIV has been PrEP, the medication.
03:43 Is that available widely in PNG or not?
03:46 I'm very proud to say that it is in 2023.
03:51 And trial projects on access to PrEP in most vulnerable populations is now available, but
03:57 that's not on a wide, it is not yet on a wide scale.
04:03 In those populations of most sex workers and men who have sex with men and the transgender
04:08 community are the people where those fantastic innovations of community-led engagement has
04:15 been happening.
04:16 But another serious part of that is women who, ordinary general population women, who
04:24 are not accessing antenatal care services and are not being offered HIV testing prior
04:31 to birth or prior to getting pregnant.
04:35 And so less, you know, only 18% of women who gave birth last year were offered an HIV test.
04:40 This is a crisis of prevention.
04:44 And so what has to happen now to try to get on top of this before it gets worse?
04:51 I think, I know this sounds fairyland stuff, but sexual and reproductive health from the
04:59 earliest possible stages of education and the provision of health services that are
05:05 comprehensive, the provision of services that address equity and what I'm calling the green
05:13 environment.
05:15 You can't have projects around climate change that don't address sexual and reproductive
05:20 health.
05:21 There's no point in saving trees if women don't have access to HIV prevention services
05:28 and young men don't have good access to high quality condoms.
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