Increasing numbers of young Australian women travelling overseas during their gap year or for working holidays are contracting HIV, frontline sexual health workers say, prompting them to call for targeted awareness campaigns.
The chief executive of the HIV support organisation Living Positive Victoria, Brent Allan, has been working in HIV and AIDS advocacy since the early 1990s and said he is encountering more women who have contracted the virus overseas.
“Because Australia has been quite successful at HIV treatment and prevention, young people are not aware that in many other countries the risks are different,” Allan said.
“While the highest prevalence of HIV is still among gay men in Australia, in other countries it is much more common among the straight community.
“I work at the coalface of those who have been diagnosed, and when people share their transmission story I am hearing more women saying they are contracting HIV in this way.”
Most people who take antiretroviral treatments as directed reduce their chance of transmitting the virus to others during unprotected sex by up to 96%. But access to treatment is still limited in many countries. Even in Australia, Allan said only between 50% and 70% of people living with HIV are on treatment.
Statistics released in October from the Kirby Institute at the University of NSW revealed the number of HIV infections across Australia rose by 10% last year, the fastest increase in about 20 years.
One-quarter of new infections in the four years to 2013 were attributed to heterosexual sex.
A professor of sexual health at the institute, Basil Donovan, said most of those Australians who contracted the virus while travelling did so in the Asia Pacific region.
“So places like Papua New Guinea, south-east Asia and Bali,” he said. “When people travel, particularly in their gap year, they’re in a very open-minded state of mind and might practice unsafe behaviours they would not at home.”
He would like to see a revival of campaigns from the 1980s and 90s, when condoms were handed out to people on aeroplanes and posters were placed in the toilets of bars overseas.
Because young Australians were not as exposed to HIV, Donovan said it was not something they necessarily thought of while travelling.
“It’s not like 20 years ago, where if you walked around any parts of Sydney or Melbourne you could see someone visibly affected by HIV,” he said.
“We have a generation now who has never seen that, because treatment is now much better. It might be time for a revival of old ‘travel safe’ campaigns, which were very successful.”
When she was a university student, Michelle Wesley contracted HIV while travelling to northern Italy in her early 20s. Many people she met there were injecting drug users. Wesley began using too, until she moved to England two years later. One year after that, in 1989, she was diagnosed with HIV.
Despite there being much more information available about HIV now, Wesley says young people are almost as ignorant as she was back then.
“I just don’t think it’s even on women’s radar, whether here or when they go travelling,” she said.
She supports newly diagnosed women through Positive Women Victoria, and said over the past year she has helped an increasing number of young women about 20 years old.
“I am absolutely seeing more women, and more of them are becoming infected overseas,” she said.
“There needs to be more sexual education in schools that includes awareness about HIV.”
An HIV advocate who campaigns for awareness among young heterosexual women, Abby Landy, said many young people held misconceptions about HIV.
She contracted HIV in 2012 from a man she briefly dated while studying in Melbourne. She says that when she became unwell and asked her doctor for a HIV test, she was told that it probably was not necessary.
“The doctor said that healthy young women like me didn’t usually have HIV,” she said.
Landy insisted and her suspicions were confirmed.
She wants people to know that HIV is treatable and manageable, and people living with it lead healthy and fulfilling lives.
But she also wants people to be aware of the risks, and to get tested sooner.
“Many of my friends are well educated and yet they will travel overseas and have unprotected sex, and only freak out when they’re back in Australia,” she said.
“That’s when they get tested.
“I think public health campaigns about HIV should be more widespread. Put messages about it in Cosmo, put it in popular magazines. Put it everywhere.”