Cambodia's success in tackling HIV/AIDS threatened: study

Cambodian officials (L) distribute condoms to boat rowers (R) to prevent HIV/AIDS

Mao Samnag, 28, former prostitute and HIV positive, sits down on her shelter in a shanty town in Phnom Penh

via CAAI

PHNOM PENH — Cambodia's widely hailed efforts in tackling HIV/AIDS are under threat with foreign donors likely to cut funding over the next two decades, a study said Tuesday.

"The success that Cambodia has had with its AIDS programme is at risk because of the possibility that external partners will withdraw financial support too quickly," said Richard Skolnik of the Results for Development Institute (R4D).

The Cambodian government will have to spend more of its own money in the fight against the virus, study coordinator Skolnik added.

New HIV infections have dropped from around 15,500 annually in the early 1990s to about 2,100 in 2009. And around 93 percent of 33,500 AIDS patients who are eligible are receiving anti-retroviral treatment.

External partners fund 90 percent of the country's AIDS programme, which currently costs just over 50 million dollars a year.

But as a result of the global financial crisis and a shift in donor priorities, those funds are likely to shrink in the coming years and Cambodia "will need to significantly increase its own allocation", the report states.

The study, "The Long-Run Costs and Financing of HIV/AIDS in Cambodia", was compiled by a team of government officials with assistance from UNAIDS and US-based R4D, which specialises in health policy analysis.

The authors compared several financing scenarios from now until 2031, four decades after HIV/AIDS was first detected in Cambodia.

Each option has a different price tag and a different rate of success in preventing new infections, and all assume the government and external donors will eventually split the costs evenly.

The most cost-effective approach recommended by the authors involves focusing prevention efforts on high-risk groups such as sex workers, men who have sex with men and injecting drug users.

This could see the annual number of new HIV infections fall to just below 1,400 by 2031 while "the total cost can be kept down to 68 million dollars a year," Skolnik told AFP.

The report will be presented to the Cambodian parliament Tuesday.

"Cambodia has a long history of fighting HIV/AIDS head-on, with effective prevention strategies, and we believe that this report will help us sharpen our strategies," said Cambodian Health Minister Mam Bunheng.

The study is part of the aids2031 project, a global initiative taking a long-term look at the virus.