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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (191983)	10/14/2001 5:40:21 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Afghanistan Bombing Could Cause AIDS Explosion Updated: Fri, Oct 12 4:48 AM EDT By Wendy Pugh MELBOURNE (Reuters) - The U.S.-led attacks on Afghanistan will eventually disrupt the flow of opium from one of the world's top suppliers and could cause heroin-injecting to surge in neighboring Pakistan, leading to a potential AIDS catastrophe, researchers said on Friday. Heroin prices on the Pakistan-Afghan border plunged after the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington as Afghanistan's opium stocks were unloaded. But the flood of heroin has slowed since U.S. and British warplanes began retaliatory air strikes on Sunday. Researchers attending an international conference in Melbourne said climbing heroin prices could force Pakistani addicts who used to sniff the drug when it was cheap and plentiful to turn to intravenous drug use. "This could be a public health crisis of unimaginable proportions. It is not speculation without foundation," said Alex Wodak of Sydney's St. Vincent's Hospital. Intravenous drug use is one of the major causes of the spread of HIV/AIDS. Nadeem-ur-Rehman, an HIV/AIDS worker and researcher in Pakistan with non-government organization Nai Zindagi (New Life), said there were already signs of a shift to intravenous injecting in the border city of Quetta. NOT IMMUNE Rehman said the prevalence of AIDS in Pakistan was low, at less than one percent of the population. But needle-sharing, the sale of blood to health services, prostitution and unprotected sex left the country vulnerable. "Everything is there. You can't say we are immune because we are a Muslim country," he said. Over 95 percent of the heroin on the streets of Europe originates in the Golden Crescent, the poppy fields on the rugged borderlands of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. U.S. officials say Afghanistan in particular has emerged as a major supplier. Rehman said Pakistan was estimated to have 500,000 chronic heroin abusers, about 440,000 of whom inhale the drug in a practice called "Chasing the Dragon." An earlier study in 1993, which he said had probably overstated the numbers, estimated there were three million heroin users in Pakistan. Wodak said an explosion in AIDS in Pakistan would have implications for the whole of Asia. "We have learned that HIV does not follow national boundaries. It is likely if there is a large pool of people who are HIV-positive in Pakistan, you can be sure it will flow into neighboring countries," Wodak said. The two experts were among 70 researchers in Melbourne on Thursday and Friday for the fourth meeting of the Global Research Network on HIV Prevention in Drug Using Populations. Seven million people in the Asia-Pacific region are living with AIDS, or the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes it, representing about 20 percent of the worldwide total, according to U.N. figures. news.excite.com -- I tried to locate the article, but wn.com is down. I found it through daypop.com, though.