It’s New Year’s eve 2006/7 in Thailand, but the largest party of the year has been cancelled. In an unprecedented coordinated terror attack on Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, 3 people have been killed and more than 30 wounded in 8 explosions. It is rumoured that some of the explosions were caused by "men in green" (soldiers) throwing grenades.
But it’s another, infinitely more potent instrument of mass killing that just a couple of days ago shook the foundations of Phuket Island, arguably Thailand most popular international tourist destination. It is now official: Everybody in Phuket will die from AIDS!
Yes! Each and every one, including, it’s safe to say, the many main street tourists who got drunk and without their mum’s guidance couldn’t tell the difference between a girl and a man dressed like a girl – or so the story goes…
The bomb was dropped by Phuket Provincial Health Office HIV/Aids section when they publicized the result from their new mobile HIV test lab initiative. Out of over a hundred people tested 85% were positive. That number is 4 times higher than the incidence of all other STDs put together among the same test subjects.
To be fair, most of those tested were ‘female sex workers’ (or were reported as such), but actually that only makes things worse. The female sex workers in Phuket and many other places in Thailand constitute a largely migrant and very mobile population. Many of them travel hundreds or thousands of miles each year between different population centres and their homes. They are the truckers of South East Asia, as it were, in a unique position to spread the virus wide and far.
In fact, to anyone who understands the ways of Thailand, given the kind of HIV positive rates frequently reported among sex workers and others, it’s a miracle Thailand’s population has not already been decimated by AIDS. Regardless of the official numbers on female sex workers, the fact is they’re omnipresent. They can be found in almost every ‘entertainment venue’, beer bar, karaoke, tea house, coffee shop, massage parlour, hotel…
We need not brand Thailand as ‘the land of prostitution’, rather Western definitions of ‘prostitution’ with their hopelessly naïve demarcations simply don’t fit here. In Thailand, there’s a huge grey zone which sociological labeling sometimes tries to capture a slice of by terms such as ’indirect sex worker’. Be that as it may, thousands upon thousands of girls (and boys) move in and out of that grey zone all the time, which in turn contributes to the enormous, never ceasing turnover in the sex worker population. Because of the nature of Thai society and culture there‘s much more general interaction and intermingling on all levels between ‘sex workers’ and the rest of the population than we’d like to think.
Moral and cultural sensitivities aside, a virus that’s infectious enough to produce an 85% positive rate in ‘female sex workers’ in Phuket would spill over into the general population in a nanosecond. - And that’s before factoring in other circumstances such as the widespread bisexuality in Thailand. Thai girls have a saying they only half jokingly attribute to Thai boys: “ying gor dai, chai gor dee”, which freely translated means, “a girl is good, but a(nother) boy is better”.
Thailand has for years been held as the poster country of successful intervention strategies in the fight against HIV/AIDS. Since I’ve already gone this far, I’ll take the next step and declare that largely BS. The ‘success’ is due to the pliant nature of stats in general and HIV stats in particular: changing disease definitions, test criteria, chosen sample populations etc., as well as the circumstance that the general standard of living, infrastructure and health care in Thailand is quite high.
In the present, typical case, the heavy counter measures consisted in the following acts of displacement and defusing
1. Phuket’s governor duly expressed his concern about the rising number of infected sex workers in Patong, (the resort town where most of Phuket’s tourism industry is centered) at a monthly meeting, and ordered everybody to ‘redouble’ testing and educational efforts.
2. In accordance with this ‘plan’ the district chief pledged to carry out monthly checks to ensure ‘entertainment venues’ comply with ‘staff’ testing.
3. Following which the obligatory censorship, such as making the story disappear from the pages of the Phuket Gazette online edition.
By the time this appears on YBYL, the whole thing will have been long forgotten. It’s high season for tourists in Phuket, and who would want to spoil the lucrative fun by conspicuous 'educational' efforts, or – most unthinkable of horrors - shutting down the ‘entertainment venues’?
And why shouldn't the story be forgotten? Eighty-five out of 100 antibody positive? The patent absurdity of these numbers is enough to tell anyone that mandatory educational efforts should be directed at those 'men and women in white' who manufacture and administer these murderous tests, not their victims.
Claus Jensen is a Dane living in Thailand where
he is able to eke out a meager but sustainable existence as a martial arts instructor primarily because
he is much taller than the average Thai, and can overpower most
ordinarily accomplished Thai boxing teachers provided they are half his size and
twice his age.
> a virus that’s infectious enough
> to produce an 85% positive rate in
> ‘female sex workers’ in Phuket
> would spill over into the general
> population in a nanosecond.
As several nanoseconds have passed since you posted this, chances are that the 85% number is not correct. Care to name (or link) the source? Or did you (or the original article/source) miss a decimal dot somewhere?
Posted by: Chanchao | January 08, 2007 at 12:54 AM
Mr. Chanchao, Im quite sure the number's risen in the meantime (if such a thing is conceivable). The article I'm basing this on originally appeared in the Phuket Gazette Online. I haven't been able to link it since it's apparently been taken down. [Note: A copy is now linked here].
I don't guarantee its accuracy in every detail either; that's not really the point. I chose it as a typical example of the Thai HIV phenomenon.
The 80%+ is stated 3 times, most prominently here:
"Most of the 100 or so people who used the service were female sex workers, some 80% to 90% of whom tested positive for HIV, she said.
About 20% tested positive for other STDs, including gonorrhea, she added."
Instead of the cumbersome "some 80% to 90%" I've chosen to write (ca.) 85%.
Quite frankly, I don't think 8.5 % would have been considered 'worrying' in a country that routinely reports 30%-50% or more positive rate in risk groups.
Posted by: Claus Jensen | January 08, 2007 at 01:33 AM