More Malaysian women found with HIV

Hazlin Hassan
The Straits Times




The number of women with HIV infections in Malaysia has soared.

The rise has added urgency to calls for the government to make HIV screening compulsory for Muslims before they get married.

Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak announced the move to make human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) screening mandatory after chairing a meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Aids yesterday.

'Next year, we will make it mandatory for all states to impose the HIV screening as part of the pre-marital course,' he told reporters.

Some states, including Kelantan, Negeri Sembilan, Sabah, Sarawak and Selangor, have already made it mandatory for Muslim couples to undergo HIV screening before they get married.

This latest move comes as fresh statistics reveal that the number of women infected with HIV is rising sharply.

The number of women infected through normal sexual intercourse rose from 5.02 per cent in 1997 to 16.3 per cent last year.

Back in 2006, the Malaysian health authorities had already detected a rise in the number of women infected with HIV/Aids.

According to the Malaysian Aids Council, the country's leading Aids non-governmental organisation, the majority of them were housewives.

It said that among women infected then, 1,628 were housewives while only 406 were sex workers.

As of June this year, the total number of housewives infected was 2,565, compared with 525 cases of infections among sex workers, according to Ministry of Health figures.

Many of these new infections were among married monogamous women, indicating that they acquired the virus from their husbands.

HIV infections among housewives were highest in Kedah, Terengganu and Kelantan, with each recording more than 200 cases, according to the New Straits Times.

Among the male cases, the majority of them were drug users. They comprised some 59,000 of the total 83,527 HIV cases in the country.

Aids researchers said this likely indicates that men who were infected via contaminated needles were transmitting the disease to their partners.

Left untreated, HIV causes Aids, which can lead to death.

While the number of women infected is rising sharply, the overall HIV infection rate in Malaysia has dropped by nearly half over the past five years, Datuk Seri Najib pointed out yesterday.

This year, there were 3,452 new HIV cases, compared with 6,756 in 2003, thanks to a national programme to stem infections, he said.

The government's goal is to reduce the figure to 11 cases per 100,000 population by 2015 compared with 12.8 cases now, he added.

But the move to make HIV screenings mandatory was condemned yesterday by the Malaysian Aids Council, which called it 'alarming'.

Council president Adeeba Kamarulzaman said in a statement that it was crucial that each person who receives a positive HIV test result also receives counselling and treatment.

She warned that women, in particular, 'due to their lower status in society, are more likely than men to be vulnerable to discrimination, violence, abandonment and ostracism, if they are found to be infected with HIV'.

The statement also warned that a policy of mandatory screening 'may drive those infected with HIV underground and not achieve its purported goal of protecting public health'.

However, most ordinary Muslims who have yet to tie the knot have welcomed the move.

Anis Abdullah, who is single and in her 30s, said that the test is not a big deal to her.

'If I'm going to be sleeping with someone, I'd really like to know that he's safe and I wouldn't be offended if he asked me to take the test either.

'It's because of this day and age we're in. It's very easy to tell yourself 'no sex before marriage', but it's not always that easy,' she told The Straits Times.

Lavinia Rahman, 38, said: 'I wouldn't want to feel 'cheated' if I were to discover my significant other is HIV- positive after we are married, regardless of how he got it.'