Page 787 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 1990
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developed AIDS itself. This latter estimate is believed to be very conservative due to the under-reporting of AIDS worldwide. The true figure could be very much higher. AIDS has been detected in almost every country of the world. The impact of AIDS on health care systems, economies and whole nations is, and will be, tremendous; as well as the obvious impact it has for individuals who contract the disease and for their families and friends.
In Australia the figures are, in many ways, no less frightening. The National Health and Medical Research Council recorded in its January 1990 bulletin a total of 1,707 cumulative cases of AIDS and of these, 934 people have died. Between 15,000 and 25,000 Australians are believed to carry the virus. The ACT has not, of course, been untouched by the AIDS virus. While the epidemic is less advanced in Canberra than in some other parts of Australia - notably Sydney - the disease has affected the ACT community and will continue to affect it for many years to come unless a cure or a vaccine is found.
However, despite the fact that much more is now known about the virus, it is considered unlikely that a cure or vaccine will be found in the foreseeable future. In Canberra, 12 people have died from AIDS and six more ACT residents have been diagnosed as having AIDS. Over 105 cases of HIV infection have been notified within the ACT and estimates are that from 300 to 500 Canberrans may be carrying the virus. Each of these numbers represents a member of the community in Canberra who may be suffering emotionally and physically or, in the case of AIDS deaths, a tragic and distressing loss of life. Members of this Assembly may not be aware that full-blown AIDS can result in a long, debilitating, painful and eventually fatal course of infections, diseases, cancers and disabilities.
Perhaps before describing the activities and programs that are in place in the ACT to try to stem the tide of this disease and to care for those infected, I should briefly describe the course of the AIDS disease so that members of the Assembly might better understand the complexities of the issues that need to be considered in dealing with and preventing the spread of the disease.
The agent responsible for transmitting AIDS is a virus called HIV. The HIV virus can be transmitted through body fluids, most particularly blood and semen, but it is in many ways a delicate virus which does not survive for long outside the environment of the body. The transmission of the virus by blood and semen has meant that the activities that place people at highest risk of contracting the infection from an HIV infected person are those involving some transfer of fluids, such as unprotected sexual intercourse. The sharing of needles and syringes used for injecting drugs, usually intravenously, where a small amount of blood from one user of the syringe can remain in the injecting equipment and therefore pass into the bloodstream of a subsequent user, is a second major method
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