The just-revised World Health Organisation position that there is in fact no threat of an HIV epidemic amongst heterosexual New Zealanders should put paid to occasional pressure to divert prevention resources away from gay and bi men, according to the NZ AIDS Foundation. The WHO last week reversed its two-decades long warning about possible outbreaks of HIV into straight populations. It now says that apart from Sub-Saharan Africa, HIV is likely to remain within the existing affected groups - which in New Zealand is almost exclusively men who have sex with men. AIDS Foundation Executive Director Rachael Le Mesurier says it is important that the Foundation isn't pressured into "diverting resources to fighting purported HIV threats, at the expense of targeting our efforts where the local HIV epidemic actually is." She says occasional pressure to direct some of the NZAF's resources towards heterosexual New Zealanders has come from "groups who believe that everybody is at equal risk of HIV infection, which is absolutely not the case." Although the Foundation has worked with the Ministry of Health to include a programme for HIV prevention in the high prevalence group of African migrants who are primarily heterosexual, "this has not affected our majority focus on men who have sex with men," according to Le Mesurier. The NZAF believes the WHO backtrack will benefit HIV education and prevention work in New Zealand, "if it sharpens people’s understanding of how HIV is, and is not, transmitted in different populations, and therefore where the real risks and priorities lie." "Despite concerns raised in the early days of the epidemic, the new infections have not moved out into the wider heterosexual community," Le Mesurier says. She notes that most heterosexual transmissions that occur within NZ, "of which there are still very few," stop with that individual or their immediate regular sexual partner and go no further. "This is based on the simple biological difference in the ease of transmission for anal intercourse compared with vaginal intercourse, compounded by the difference in rates of sexual partnering." Even in the very early days of the epidemic, the AIDS Foundation observed that men who have sex with men, intravenous drug users, sex workers and people who relied on blood products were the New Zealanders who are at heightened risk, Le Mesurier says. "As we learned more about the conditions necessary for HIV to sustain itself at epidemic levels, it became clear that these conditions were not present in NZ for the heterosexual population, and therefore that heterosexual HIV epidemic spread was less and less likely." Since then, the majority of local HIV infections have continued to occur among gay and bi men, with very few local infections acquired via heterosexual sex, "and we have seen almost no evidence of secondary heterosexual transmission here." Le Mesurier says Homosexual Law reform in 1986 and the protection against discrimination for homosexuals contained in the Human Rights Amendment in 1993 assisted the fight against the HIV epidemic by reducing the number of closeted men moving backwards and forwards from male and female sex partners. She is hopeful that, in the wake of the WHO's revised stance, New Zealand's Pacific Island neighbours will also adopt similar legal revisions, thus enabling sexual and HIV issues there to be more easily addressed.
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News staff
First published: Wednesday, 18th June 2008 - 2:14am