No. 16 - 11/2005
28 November 2005

Human Rights

Fear, ignorance raises risk of HIV in migrant workers

Tawngtai (S.H.A.N.)

Fear and lack of knowledge about HIV/AIDS is driving many migrant workers from Burma to make confidential phone calls to a centre in Chiang Mai that offers counseling, residents and staff of the centre say.

"Many of them have made a phone call to us for consulting, just a few of people dared to come to our centre", said Mr. Dui, a Thai resident of the New Life Friend Centre. Mr. Dui, who has been HIV-positive for 13 years, has lived at the centre for four years.

Migrant workers with HIV are afraid to come to the New Life Friend Centre because they don't want their employers or their communities to know that they are HIV-positive, out of fear they will lose their jobs, according to Sumran Ta-gan, president of the NLFC.

Mr. Sumran said such fear and lack of knowledge about HIV/AIDS raised the risk for migrant workers to be infected. He said he did not know the exact number of HIV-positive workers who have called the centre; many of them are men and some are women. Some work at day labor's job and some are sex workers.

Chiang Mai's population of over 3 million includes 400,000 infected with the HIV virus, Sumran said, citing a report from Chiang Mai's Public Health Department. Each day 3 more people are infected and the largest age group of people infected has shifted from 35-80 years old to young people from 17-23 years.

"Many of them do not understand very well about HIV prevention because they only leaned from media such as [Thai] brochures and TV which has a language barrier for them" he said.

Migrant workers in Chiang Mai number 103,133 people who registered in 2005, according to the Chiang Mai labor Department. In all of Thailand there are more than 1 million migrants from Burma, Laos and Cambodia. More who are not registered because of coming late for the registration time, the Migrant Action Program (MAP) estimates.

Chiang Mai-based the New Life Friend Centre to help HIV-positive people to live normal and productive lives in their communities by providing counseling, treatment and advice on how to obtain anti-retroviral (ARV) medications that can slow down the progression into AIDS.

Most migrant workers from Burma work at construction sites and the young workers are at jobs with high-risk for HIV/AIDS such as karaoke bar hostesses, sex worker, and workers at restaurants, bars and gay nightclubs, and yet they lack basic knowledge of HIV prevention-such as use of condoms during sex and avoiding used needles.

"The HIV infections among the migrant communities look like those of Thai people about ten years ago. It's infected so fast at that time. Now migrant workers are like this because they don't know how to prevent HIV and some people think HIV/AIDS is not a big problem for them", said a staff of Migrant Action Program (MAP) whose duty is to takes care of HIV positive migrants and other health problem.

He added this year four migrant workers died of AIDS-related illness at his centre. Three of the dead are Shan and one is Pa-O from Burma. He also said the migrant workers who are HIV-positive do not come to the centre until they were seriously ill and some even then do not want to tell him that they are infected with HIV.