SCMP-HIV exploding on heroin routes

[hlaing@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

South China Morning Post

Saturday  October 3  1998

HIV exploding on heroin routes 
WILLIAM BARNES in Bangkok 

HIV infection is flooding out of Burma into China, India and eastern Europe
along heroin trafficking routes, a report published yesterday says.

The link is no coincidence. Burma - the source of perhaps three-quarters of
the world's heroin - has not only a major domestic addiction problem but
also a severe HIV epidemic.

The result is an alarming trail of distinctive "Burmese" HIV along the
underground drug routes out of the country, said the Southeast Asian
Information Network (SAIN) human rights group.

"Under this regime Burma is not only becoming a narco-state but its people
and those of its neighbours are facing two devastating epidemics: injecting
drug use and HIV/AIDS," said Chris Beyrer, a co-author of the report and
epidemiologist at America's Johns Hopkins University.

The HIV-1 that has produced the global pandemic has many distinct
sub-types: a B sub-type transmitted by homosexuals and intravenous drug
users dominates in America and Europe.

An E variety, easily transferred through heterosexual sex, is rampant in
Thailand, Vietnam and Cambodia. Sub-type E outbreaks in Texas, Jakarta and
Uruguay have been traced to HIV infections in UN soldiers serving in
Cambodia four years ago.

A third sub-type - C - has been found along a highway leading from Burma to
northwest China, the route of potent Burmese heroin and injecting drug
users who share needles . . . and the infection.

Yunnan has four-fifths of all of China's HIV infection, the Chinese
Ministry of Health said recently.

In the border town of Ruili, opposite Burma's Kachin state, two-thirds of
injecting drug users were HIV positive in 1994.

"Burmese" HIV has already reached Xinjiang in China's northwest.

In 1995, no Xinjiang addicts had the virus; a year later a quarter had been
infected, according to Zheng Xiwen, a professor at the Chinese Academy of
Preventive Medicine and the leader of China's AIDS monitoring programme.

"The bulk of heroin appears to cross through China's western borders into
Kazakhstan and the Russian east," the SAIN report notes.

Pure, cut-price heroin has become readily available in Hungary and Poland,
according to doctors there.

China's third epidemic zone is Guangxi province, bordering Yunnan and
Vietnam. Two-thirds of addicts in the city of Baise are infected with the
sub-type C virus.

HIV has moved strongly across into India, too: last year 80 per cent of
drug addicts in Manipur state bordering Burma were HIV-positive.

A doctor treating addicts in Madras, southwest India, Dr Shakuntala
Mudialar, said heroin, and quickly afterwards HIV, swept across the border
after 1995, when India and Burma signed a treaty to open up cross-border
trade.