INQUIRER FILE PHOTO
MANILA, Philippines — The daily average rate of new human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) cases in the country increased, Health Secretary Teodoro Herbosa said on Tuesday.
According to Herbosa, there are about 50 new recorded HIV cases daily, which is higher than the 22 daily case rate in 2022.
“The latest figure is about 50 new cases a day,” Herbosa told reporters on the sidelines of the 20th World Congress of Chinese Medicine and the 15th Traditional and Alternative Health Care Congress at the Manila Hotel.
“We’ve kind of doubled from [the] previous year of 22 cases a day,” he noted.
Despite the increased number of daily new cases, Herbosa said that the total number of HIV patients is less than one percent of the country’s population.
Herbosa also said that there is an increase in the number of HIV- positives among the younger generation.
“Yes [there is an increase], we’ve noted that most of our new HIV cases are the younger population,” he said, pointing out that 47 percent of all new cases came from the 15 to 24 year-old bracket.
“So I was told [that] of the new cases, 47 percent are young. Fifteen years old was the youngest,” he said.
He stressed the need for more HIV testing and better education on the diseases that can be contracted through “risky behaviors” to slow down the increase of new infections in the country.
Herbosa also mentioned that Dr. Edsel Salvana warned him of a more infectious HIV “variant.”
“I talked to experts, [to] Dr. Edsel Salvana, who’s helping and advising us. He’s telling me there’s a new subvariant…there’s new variant that’s quite more infectious,” Herbosa said.
“And he’s telling me it’s been happening even before [infections from new variant], we just have not detected it…we’re concentrated so much on Covid-19,” he added.
Prevalence of HIV among the younger generation
Based on data from the HIV/AIDS and ART Registry of the Philippines forwarded by DOH to INQUIRER.net, it said that there were 466 HIV-positive youths aged 15 to 24 as of June of this year.
From this number, 437, or 94 percent, are male, while 29, or 6 percent, are female.
“Four hundred sixty-three (99%) cases were infected through sexual contact (354 males had history of sex with another male, 56 through sex with both males and females, and 53 had male-female sex), one (<1%) was infected through sharing of infected needles, and two cases (<1%) had no data on mode of transmission,” the data said.
In June alone, there were 81 new HIV cases among adolescents aged 10 to 19 years old, while there were nine new HIV cases among children less than 10 years old.
Meanwhile, from January 1984 to June 2023, there were already 34,415 reported cases of HIV in the 15- to 24-year-old bracket.