Women, infants at higher risk of HIV from 'downstream' infections in Philippines

Cebu (Philippines) - Climbing HIV infection rates in the Philippines are bucking the global trend of decline.

When Clarissa's younger sister died, she had little time to dwell on her own grief. There were the three young children left behind to think of, two of them HIV positive.
Together with her own children, there are now seven youngsters crammed in her tiny, crumbling shanty in Cebu in central Philippines. Space and money are tight as they all depend on Clarissa's husband who is a day labourer.
"The kids have no father or mother now. They have no one," said the slight 31-year-old. Clarissa's sister and her partner both died from HIV-related complications traced back to injecting drugs. Clarissa suspects that it was her sister's partner that got her started on drugs.
"Charity groups said the child who does not have HIV could be put up for adoption. But I couldn't bear for them to be separated. And who will make sure the two take their medication?" said Clarissa, who did not want to give her full name.
Climbing HIV infection rates in the Philippines are bucking the global trend of decline.
Along with Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka in the Asia-Pacific region, the Philippines saw the rate of new HIV infections increase by more than 25 per cent from 2001 to 2011.
Increasing infections among injecting drug users combined with low condom use and high fertility rates have health experts worried about "downstream" HIV infections - when the virus spreads to people who are not typically at risk of HIV, like children who acquire the virus through mother-to-child transmission.
"Mother to child transmission is definitely an emerging problem," said Genesis Samonte, head of the Department of Health HIV/AIDS surveillance unit.
Of the 84 children who acquired HIV through mother-to-child transmission since 1990, 17 - or one fifth - were reported in 2015 alone. "Judging from the number of pregnant women we see in the clinics who test positive, this is definitely an underreported number," Samonte said.
In 2015 there were a total of 30,356 recorded HIV infections in the Philippines, more than 80 percent of which were reported since 2010.
At this current rate, the health department predicts that the total number of HIV infections will grow to 133,000 by 2022.
While majority of the infections cluster around men who have unprotected sex with men, HIV among injecting drug users is centred in Cebu City.