High-flying businesspeople and fly-in, fly-out workers are being blamed for a spike in HIV infections across Western Australia.

The highly-mobile industries that employ a large portion of the WA population mean that workers are on the move, and they take their diseases with them.

New stats show the number of West Australians diagnosed with HIV has more than doubled in 10 years, up to 119 new cases in the last year alone.

The issue was the central topic at the recent HIV and Mobile Populations conference in Perth.

At the conference, acting director general of the Health Department Bryan Stokes, said frequent travel to South-East Asia and the prevalence of FIFO work is bringing more people in and out of the state than ever.

“Western Australia has possibly one of the most complex and rapidly changing HIV epidemiology of all Australian jurisdictions,” Dr Stokes told the conference.

“How we respond to HIV is confounded by issues such as distance as well as equity of access to treatment and care for people living in regional and remote areas of Western Australia

“This increase in HIV notifications was in part attributable to a rise in the number of overseas-acquired HIV infections.

“Between 2009 and 2013, most overseas cases acquired their infection in sub-Saharan Africa.

“The vast majority – that is 88 per cent – of people who acquired HIV there were born in the region, while about half of the people who acquired HIV in South-East Asia were born there, and about 35 per cent were Australian-born.”

Graham Brown, senior research fellow at the Australian research Centre for Sex, Health and Society, said it was a complicated issue, driven by the state’s recent resource success.

He says the FIFO lifestyle means a number of Western Australians are now living in Thailand or Indonesia, flying in and out of WA for their roles in a number of industries.

But the epidemiology indicates that most of those who contract HIV abroad are not young, inexperienced backpackers but older, more ‘wisened’ travellers who did not consider themselves at risk.

Rates of infection are about the same among men who have sex with men, as among those who have sex with women.