In Australia and New Zealand there were an estimated 15,400 people living with HIV/AIDS in 2002, 14,000 of them in Australia, or 0.1% of the adult population, only 1,000 of them women – the lowest female to male sex ratio in the world. Fewer than 200 deaths occurred due to AIDS in 2002. However, the annual number of new HIV diagnoses in Australia has gradually increased from 650 in 1998 to about 800 in 2002.

The epidemic tends to be confined largely to gay men with 85% of new HIV diagnoses accounted for by gay sex, 8.5% by heterosexual sex and 4% by injecting drug use. A study in the Australian cities of Sydney and Melbourne in 1998 found that a third of gay men were less concerned about HIV infection since the introduction of antiretroviral treatments. These men were found to be 40% more likely to have had recent unprotected anal sex than men whose fear of infection was unchanged by the introduction of new therapies.

The per capita rates of HIV diagnoses among Australia’s indigenous peoples has been similar but there is a higher proportion of diagnosis among women (36% of the total) and injecting drug users (20%) and much lower in gay men (42%).

Papua New Guinea

Just across the Torres Strait from Australia is the nation with the highest HIV rate in the Pacific region and one with an accelerating HIV epidemic, which UNAIDS fears is the best candidate for an African-style generalised epidemic outside Africa. In 2002 when we last reported on this country, there were an estimated 5,400 people living with HIV/AIDS, or 0.22% of the adult population. This has since expanded to 16,000 people (4,800 of them women), or 0.6% of the population. There were 2120 new cases recorded in 2003 and for the first time the majority of them were in women.

The annual number of new infections has been increasing steadily since they first started being detected in any significant amount in 1995. In 20303 1.4% of pregnant women in the capital, Port Moresby, tested HIV-positive and 2.5% in the northern town of Lae. More than twice as many young women under 24 have been diagnosed as men of that age. Available data suggests that the epidemic is centred on commercial and causal sex, most of it heterosexual.

Recent surveys in Irian Jaya (West Papua) in the Indonesian half of New Guinea found that unmarried young women were almost ten times and young men five times more likely to be sexually active compared with other Indonesians and that 29% of you sexually active Papuan women reported having sex with a man more than ten years older than themselves.