HAITI/DOMINICAN REPUBLIC:
Early Sex Initiation and AIDS
Diógenes Pina

SANTO DOMINGO,  (IPS) - Early sexual initiation and a lack of prevention policies are sowing the seeds of AIDS proliferation, warns a UNICEF study carried out at locations straddling the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

Field surveys at Ouanaminthe (Wanament), a Haitian town 245 kilometres from Port-au-Prince, and Dajabón, 300 kilometres from Santo Domingo, found that 61.9 percent of those interviewed said they knew an HIV-carrier, 30.3 percent had a friend who was infected, and 14.6 percent had a close relative living with HIV.

The study by the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and the community organisation Catholic Relief Services also found that 93 percent of those interviewed had heard about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The aim of the research was, in effect, to determine knowledge and perception of the risk of infection with HIV/AIDS among children and adolescents in these two towns, located on one of the border crossings between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. They were chosen as a sample to represent the scope of the health problem among young people on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, shared by the two countries.

Tad Palac, the UNICEF representative in Santo Domingo, warned that if preventive action against HIV/AIDS is not taken now, the consequences will have to be paid for later.

At the public presentation of the survey, Palac said there was an urgent need to reinforce strategies for the prevention of HIV infection and to increase investment in this priority area.

He highlighted other efforts to fight the AIDS pandemic, such as workshops and publications, but said that it was necessary to go further and ask how many young people were being influenced to postpone their first sexual experience.

Palac's concern arises from a key result of the study. Nearly 27 percent of teenagers aged 10 to 17 from both survey areas said they had already had sexual intercourse.

The Baseline Survey on Knowledge, Attitudes and Practices of Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS among 1,302 boys, girls and adolescents in Dajabón and Wanament found that, out of the 26.9 percent of respondents who had had sexual relations, 27.8 percent said they had their first such experience before the age of 10.

Another central result was that barely 11 percent of the youngsters interviewed had used protection during sexual intercourse.

The behaviour of those interviewed was different according to their place of origin, the study found. In Dajabón, only 8.8 percent had experience of sexual intercourse, while in Wanament the proportion was 45.6 percent.

The representative of Catholic Relief Services said at the Nov. 1 presentation of the study that adolescence and youth were preparative stages for the future, and that the survey data were food for thought for institutions working with children, to focus more of their action on working with children's biological and foster families.

About 3,000 Dominican children suffer from AIDS, and another 33,000 have been orphaned by the disease.

Adult HIV prevalence is estimated at 1.7 percent in the Dominican Republic, which has a population of 8.5 million. According to official records, 2,490 Dominicans needed antiretroviral therapy for advanced stages of AIDS last year. This number represents 26 percent of all those who required antiretroviral medicines.

In contrast, in Haiti which has a population of eight million, HIV prevalence among adults is 5.6 percent, the highest rate of infection in the world outside of Africa, as the study authors confirmed.

The number of people in the Caribbean region affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic is estimated by international organisations at around 430,000, 2.3 percent of the adult population. But 85 percent of these cases are concentrated in the Dominican Republic and Haiti.

That is the reason why projects that include both countries must be carried out, in order to attack the root causes of the problem directly, UNICEF and Catholic Relief Services stated in the introduction to the study.

The survey sample was taken from schoolchildren aged 10 to 17 years in June 2005, attending San Martín de Porres and La Altagracia schools in Dajabón, and Toussaint L'Ouverture and La Estrella schools in Ouanaminthe.

Questionnaires were also sent to the directors of health services in the two border towns, asking how many HIV tests had been carried out in the last year, and how many positive cases were found. Out of 1,224 people tested in Dajabón, 86 were HIV positive (7.0 percent), while in Ouanaminthe, 277 people were infected out of the 2,808 studied (9.8 percent).