Study: AIDS
Hitting Asian Gays At High Rates

HIV infection rates among gay men in many parts of Asia are as high as those that devastated American gay communities in the late 1980s, top officials of the UNAIDS agency said Tuesday, according to Agence France-Presse.

Peter Piot, UNAIDS executive director, urged more action to prevent the spread of the disease among gay men who have unsafe sex and stressed the importance of working with affected communities.

"All over Asia there are now epidemics of HIV in men who have sex with men of the same magnitude that we saw in this country 25 years ago," Piot told AFP.

Paul De Lay, director of Evidence, Monitoring, and Policy at UNAIDS, said the rise in HIV infections could be due to a number of factors, including less funding for programs that target men who have sex with men and the fact that there were new groups who were less aware of the risks of unprotected sex. (The Advocate)