By Kang Shin-who
Staff Reporter
Nearly 30 percent of AIDS patients end up committing suicide, Korean Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention (KCDC) said Thursday.
According to KCDC, at the beginning of the year 4,755 people were either HIV positive or suffering from the effects of AIDS. As of March, this year 864 had died. Of this figure 258 people killed themselves.
Moreover, the number of HIV-positive people who end their lives has continued to grow over last five years, 18 in 2002, 26 in 2005 and 33 last year.
Experts say that the figure indicates that our society still isolates and alienates AIDS patients.
``Public prejudice against AIDS has led to discrimination by other members of society creating a sense of isolation,'' Seong Kyeong-hoon, education manager of Korea Alliance to Defeat AIDS told The Korea Times.
``To change it, we should open the AIDS issue to the public. I think celebrities who are HIV positive should speak out as has U.S. basketball star Magic Johnson,'' Seong added.
So far, 175 people were reported to KCDC having contracted HIV virus in the first quarter of the year. However, the disease center says that many patients have not come forward.
Among the reported patients, 162 or 93 percent were male and about 26 percent of them were in their 40s; 25 percent were in 30s, followed by 17 percent in 20s.
The health center also sampled 48 among them and found that nearly 67 percent were infected with the disease through heterosexual relationship while 33 percent got it through homosexual relationship.