Malaysia sees HIV uptick in young people. Are social stigma, poor education to blame?

Some 244 students between 18 and 25 years old were infected last year, a 31 per cent increase from 2021, said Higher Education Minister Zambry Abdul Kadir on Wednesday, with infections across the age group accounting for about 7 per cent of all new HIV cases last year.

Malaysia’s 2023 report to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/Aids estimated that there were 86,000 people living with HIV in the Southeast Asian nation in 2022, with 80 per cent aware of their condition.

In January last year, Malaysia launched a pilot programme to provide public access to Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP), which can lower the chances of getting HIV from sex by over 90 per cent and from injecting drugs by over 70 per cent if taken daily, according to the US Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Before the initiative, PrEP was only available at private clinics. As of March this year, over 3,400 people have received the drug regimen under the programme.

Code Blue, a Malaysian medical news agency, reported in May that the transmission rate of HIV among those who have participated in the programme stood at just 0.2 per cent.

“This means that we successfully prevented HIV in 99.8 per cent of high-risk individuals. This shows that PrEP is very effective,” said the health ministry’s disease control division director Anita Suleiman, in Code Blue’s report.

Ramesh Vadiveloo, who leads HIV/Aids advocacy group Advocate Asia, called the programme an “amazing initiative” but warned that students were often reluctant to go to a government facility because of stigma.

“They want it to be a community-based healthcare service provider, they want it to be accessible and they want it to be fast,” he said to This Week in Asia.

Ramesh, who has experience