| Afghanistan has first official AIDS deaths Reuters
06/01/2004
By Sayed Salahuddin
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KABUL - The deaths of an Afghan man and two of his children have marked the first official fatalities from the AIDS virus in deeply conservative Afghanistan, a health ministry official says. A 45-year-old man along with his six-month-old son and two-year-old daughter died recently in a Kabul hospital where they were being treated for AIDS, said Dr Naqibullah Safi, the head of the ministry's HIV department. Safi did not identify the man. The wife of the victim was alive, he said. "The man had been suffering from AIDS for the past seven years or so," Safi told Reuters on Tuesday, adding that the deaths were the first official AIDS fatalities registered with the ministry. He said between 200 and 300 men and women were registered as AIDS sufferers in Afghanistan. But he said the real number of sufferers would be far higher, because many Afghans with HIV or AIDS would avoid talking about it publicly. Safi linked AIDS cases in Afghanistan to drug abuse as well as sex. There was little awareness in the war-shattered country about the disease and how it spreads, he said. Most affected people appear to have contracted AIDS from Afghans who had lived abroad as refugees but who have returned home in their millions since late 2001. The risk of HIV/AIDS increased after the hardline Islamic Taliban regime was toppled nearly three years ago, as drug abuse spreads in the world's largest source of heroin and new freedoms appear in cities, including prostitution. The ousted Taliban would publicly lash or stone to death adulterers, including women, and the harsh interpretation of Islamic sharia law appears to have curbed promiscuity and slowed the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. President Hamid Karzai's U.S.-backed government has come under fire from some Islamists for failing to clamp down on brothels that have opened in the capital.
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