transmitted in Iran chiefly by drug addicts sharing needles, is now being transmitted more often by sex and thereby threatens the country with a “volcanic explosion” of the disease.
She said the number of registered AIDS victims is just 22,000. But for the first time, a health minister has admitted what many experts have long said—that most AIDS victims do not register.
Vahid-Dastjerdi, the only female cabinet minister since the revolution, said the true number of AIDS victims in Iran was probably more like 80,000, as around the world there are normally four times as many AIDS victims as AIDS registrants.
She said Iran’s figure was still low by global standards. But what concerned her was that now 7 percent of the known carriers of AIDS got the disease sexually or, as she phrased it, “by immoral behavior.”
As a result, she said, “In the future we could have a volcanic eruption of AIDS in our country.”
Vahid-Dastjerdi, a gynecologist, said studies show that half of the prostitutes in Iran carry AIDS.
The government has for years promoted birth control by making condoms widely available in shops. That could be a means of restricting the spread of AIDS. Vahid-Dastjerdi did not propose any medical checks or education of prostitutes, methods used in many countries to try to slow the spread of AIDS.