A limited health work force and inadequate human resources were some of the biggest problems faced to tackle HIV/AIDS in the country, according to health officials. This lacuna was followed by a lack of core competency to provide capacity building of other stakeholders to fight HIV/AIDS and inadequate research capacity for evidence-based programming. With about 144 cases reported until today, an increasing trend of HIV/AIDS infection was seen with 37 cases detected in 2007 alone. Of the total, 73 were male and 71 were female, and over 80 percent of the infected cases fell in the prime age gap of 15 to 39. Sangay Wangmo, program officer of National STIs and HIV/AIDS prevention and control program under health ministry, told Kuensel that the health work force for HIV was integrated within the existing health system and had no special categories of counsellors, doctors or other health professionals. "In other countries, there are people trained specifically for prevention of HIV/AIDS but here, even if we have trained people, they have other responsibilities to handle and this dilutes their efficiency,' she said. At the national level, budgets received from different donors were used for the national strategic plan through different components to prevent the disease, but to cope up with manpower shortage, multi-sectoral task forces (MSTF) were formed at the district level. "A core team comprising a district medical officer as the focal person is formed for HIV care and treatment but the team is also responsible for other activities in the hospital,' said Sangay Wangmo. At basic health unit (BHU) level, the health assistant was the focal person, while gups chaired the MSTF at the community level. "Dealing with HIV/AIDS requires so much inter-personal interaction and the counsellors need to be trained to have skills to talk and entice people to get themselves tested,' she said. She said that, besides having a limited work force, there was inconsistency in the core team like the trained health workers getting transferred. The cascade trainings also lacked supervision and monitoring. Bhutan's health worker to population ratio is at 2.5 is to1,000. Meanwhile, Dr Sangay Thinley, coordinator of HIV, TB and Malaria under the world health organisation (WHO-South East Asia regional office) told Kuensel that, compared to the rest of the countries in the region, Bhutan fell under low endemic area. "But the major concern in Bhutan is the wide spread of HIV victims across society. It includes people from civil service to private sector to armed force, while in other countries significant numbers can be determined in certain sections of the population,' he said. "So it's very important to speed up all prevention measures because there's potential risk of the disease becoming epidemic,' he said, adding that improving human resource was an important measure to sustain preventive initiatives. To discuss the situation of human resource in the context of a national HIV/AIDS program, a four-day work shop began yesterday in Paro. About eleven member countries from South East Asian countries are attending the workshop funded by WHO.