HIV/AIDS In Udon Thani

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Grandad
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HIV/AIDS In Udon Thani

Post by Grandad » June 29, 2006, 3:46 pm

Not a very nice subject I know, but I think it's something we should all be aware of.

I would like to know if there are any/many cases of HIV/AIDS in Udon Thani. It's difficult to get figures on these, so I was wondering if any members know anything, or are completely in the dark...like me..



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rickfarang
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Post by rickfarang » June 29, 2006, 9:02 pm

We know of several deaths from AIDS in my wife's village (100 KN N.E. of Udon Thani) over the last few years. Women go down to Phuket or other places to try and get rich, then come home to die. AIDS is here. No question about it. Really hasn't been any question about it for a long time.

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Post by shortimer » June 30, 2006, 1:09 am

My TGFf is a head nurse at goverment hospital in Nong Khai so I will attempt to ask her to what extent Aids is evident in the Udon Thani area. Have to be carefull though, our english/ thai conversations have been know to get lost in translation and misunderstood. If I,m not carefull she might think I am telling her something she doesn'y want to hear!!!!!!!!! I will let you know what she says in couple of days as she is teaching a nursing class in Nakhon Phanom right now.
short time as in short time till I can retire

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Post by izzix » June 30, 2006, 11:39 pm

most definately ,if you go to the hospital in Khon Kaen they have a major research facility for HIV/AIDS in issan.Specialist doctors fly in from BKK several days a week.
If you do get infected thats the place to go although you can get medication at other hospitals in Udon and NongKhai.

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Papy Ion
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Post by Papy Ion » July 1, 2006, 12:37 am

rickfarang wrote:We know of several deaths from AIDS in my wife's village (100 KN N.E. of Udon Thani) over the last few years. Women go down to Phuket or other places to try and get rich, then come home to die. AIDS is here. No question about it. Really hasn't been any question about it for a long time.
Not the same village, but the same (very sad) story at my wife's birthplace. We personally know at least 5 HIV infected individuals there and two persons who died last year because of AIDS for sure in the vicinity.

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Post by Grandad » July 1, 2006, 11:13 am

It would be interesting to know WHERE these people contracted the disease. You can understand if they went to Pattaya and 'worked' for a while and got it, or if they picked it up locally.

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Papy Ion
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Post by Papy Ion » July 1, 2006, 12:20 pm

I don't know for sure, but most of those people probably contracted the disease locally. To my knowledge, amongst the infected persons, only one woman has worked in Pattaya. One man who died of AIDS never went to Pattaya as far as I know, but he worked in Bangkok and in Taiwan for a while.

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Post by Grandad » July 1, 2006, 3:40 pm

I am interested because since I have been living in Udon this year I have heard quite a few 'farangs' saying that they don't wear condoms when they go with a (bar) girl. When I asked about the risks they have said that "they don't care if they catch aids"

Surely they cannot be serious???

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izzix
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Post by izzix » July 1, 2006, 8:55 pm

the thais i know who became HIV+ and died were all carrying on with each other ,1 guy became infected off another infected girl even though he knew she was HIV+ ,how dumb can you get.
IMO the situation is very serious in issan so dont do any bareback riding.
the infected thais were not in the sex business just having affairs and taking no precautions .
Its possible 1 of them was infected from a blood transfusion but cant be proven .
and very few would be able to afford medication or tests or followup despite the cutprice drugs.

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Post by Grandad » July 2, 2006, 9:29 am

izzix wrote: IMO the situation is very serious in issan so dont do any bareback riding.

That's just it - it's your opinion, but really you don't know - and so does nearly everyone else you ask - no-one really knows HOW bad it is. It's just the same as the 80's. Lack of education.

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Post by Miruku » July 2, 2006, 11:04 am

It's worse than the 80's Grandad, because millions of more people are living with the virus than then and as it can take a long time to manifest itself into full blown AIDS (9 years in the case of my late friend)during which time the infection can be passed on, it is just crazy to question whether or not precautions are necessary. It is like tobacco, back in the 80's we came to know that tobacco could kill you but now we know that smoking will almost surely seriously affect the smoker's health, and recently we learned that it surely affects those inhaling 2nd hand smoke. I once met a top AIDS researcher (on a plane flight) who reminded me that HIV is a virus just like influenza, herpes, most cancers and the common cold. Scientists have been trying for 100 years but so far nobody has succeeded to kill a single virus. This expert believes that the cure which will kill all viruses will probably be stumbled upon at some time in the future like antibiotics were during the second world war. In the meantime everybody needs to take the utmost care.

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izzix
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Post by izzix » July 2, 2006, 10:35 pm

i had sex with an attractive teacher some years back in NK,didnt use a rubber ,then about 12months later i found out she was HIV+. she didnt tell me she was + ,and i was lucky i wasnt infected from her .she did infect several other (thai)guys though .i saw her waste away and finally die .her husband a cop, also died of AIDS and they left behind 2 kids with no parents .

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Post by rickfarang » July 2, 2006, 10:58 pm

Grandad wrote:
izzix wrote: IMO the situation is very serious in issan so dont do any bareback riding.

That's just it - it's your opinion, but really you don't know - and so does nearly everyone else you ask - no-one really knows HOW bad it is. It's just the same as the 80's. Lack of education.

If you are trying to look at this statistically:

The CIA World Factbook's 2003 estimate for the adult prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Thailand is 1.5%. Doesn't sound like much, but that's about 570,000 people in the country who are thought to be infected, and 58,000 dying of it each year -about 0.1%, about right for an average 12 years of infection before death.

So, your chance of becoming infected from one particular random encounter is small. When a friend, loved one, or you do become infected, and you only have to be "*unlucky" once, statistics don't mean very much. You are 100% scr@wed. Get it?

This question has seen more than adequate debate over the last decade. If a person, once warned, wants to deceive himself or herself and imagine that the risks are very low, and that HIV is not a very terrible and sad disease, that is his or her business. Just please try to not infect others.


* Here, "unlucky" = foolish or stupid, pick whichever seems most appropriate.

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Post by citizen33 » July 3, 2006, 3:03 am

Although I read a doctoral thesis recently on roll out of free AIDS/HIV treatment across the kingdom, it did not have good figures on incidence. This is because working out how many people in the general population have HIV/AIDS is quite difficult. Most studies are done on antenatal attendees, commercial sex workers, or samples of some other population group, like young males. Some rough idea can be obtained from the following report:

http://data.unaids.org/Publications/Fac ... and_EN.pdf

This suggests that in 2001-03 less than 20% of CSWs in Udon were seropositive (the colour codes are hard to read on my browser). This is lower than the figures reported in Chiang Mai in the early 1990s, which I think were over 30%, and have now fallen back a bit. That still puts Udon at the higher end for Isan cities. A couple of years ago Udon was mentioned to me by an expert in this field as one of the Isan hotspots. Interestingly, the hotspot in Eastern province is not Pattaya but Rayong. Probably one of the groups for whom the MoPH's '100% condom use' campaign has had most impact is CSWs. If you can read Thai, the MoPH's website may have some better figures.

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FrazeeDK
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Rayong hotspot

Post by FrazeeDK » July 3, 2006, 8:41 pm

makes sense though... Rayong Province is full of hundreds of factories with workers having a regular check and hitting the CSW's every payday.. On statistics, I've read that CSW's servicing Farang tend to use condoms.. Is the converse true for CSW's servicing Thai factory workers?? That might explain the disparity between Pattaya and Rayong.
Dave

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izzix
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Post by izzix » July 3, 2006, 11:52 pm

and from what i know not all cases of death from AIDS related in rural areas will not be registered as such.
These things are kept very secret around the villages and if some guy or gal dies of a shamefull reason it will get covered up and just passed off as a normal type of death .
They may not have visited a hospital or clinic due to not enough money or shame so its all kept very quiet and they just wither away in secret.
all neighbours will know is that they died of say lung cancer or some other complaint.
Fear of neighbours finding out about their disease is paramount.
i know someone who takes HAART and looks normal but nobody else in the village knows their little secret.

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Post by Grandad » July 4, 2006, 11:51 am

There is also the problem that treatment for HIV patients such as HAART is really expensive - especially for Thai's.

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Post by Miruku » July 4, 2006, 12:50 pm

I think one of the scariest aspects about the HIV/AIDS epidemic is firstly that nobody knows they have it until they are tested at the earliest, which can occur many years after they were infected and could be passing it on to others, and secondly there is no compulsion for infected people not to infect others. There has been a recent case in Australia where an infected man with "malice a fore thought" deliberately despite police and health officials warnings, infected more than a dozen people by repeatedly having unprotected sex with them after assuring each of them that he had been tested and was found to be negative. He is now in jail but that must be cold comfort to his infected partners. Even if only a small proportion of infected people is unknowingly or uncaringly or deliberately infecting other people, the numbers of victims must be increasing at a frightening rate. Thus again I don't think there is any excuse for anybody ignoring precautions and consequently becoming infected with this incurable disease.

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izzix
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Post by izzix » July 5, 2006, 12:13 am

in these rural areas there is no check on how somebody dies ,no coroner or inquest if they die outside hospital .
So the death certificate will say whatever the family wants it to say. Somebody might have a suspicion but they will keep quiet or gossip about it .
The local monks might know what actually happened but they will keep quiet about it.I dont think they would want to cause the family undue worry.
The teacher i knew who died of AIDS lived her final days in a shack in the middle of nowhere ,a sorry state of afairs but by then she was on HAART but it was too late for that . Another gal was in a temple site hoping for a miracle cure but didnt know about HAART ,she was also looking very thin by then ,very sad story, she left a baby behind .

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Post by Jo » July 7, 2006, 4:06 pm

Thre are and handful of children at udon girls home with AIDS im under the impression many have close relatives still alive around the area with the virus also, but as people have mentioned its impossible to know the extent of the problem due to it not being reported.

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