Dealing with challenges of HIV

Article: Salome Donkor
THE fact that HIV and AIDS continues to pose a major challenge to the economic development of Africa because its infection rate is about 70 per cent , is well- known by many people.
It is also common knowledgethat HIV continues to pose a developmental challenge to most countries in Sub-saharan Africa where 22.5 million out of the 33.2 million people are infected with the disease.
Furthermore, the fact that in Ghana the national response programme has made significant impact to the extent that the national prevalence rate is now 1.9 per cent and various interventions are working ;leading to a very high level of awareness creation, is also not new. Majority of the infections in the country, nearly 90 per cent are within the age group of 15-49 years ,with 58 per cent of infected people being women and girls.
According to the Ghana AIDS Commission (GAC), currently, awareness creation in the country is almost universal and 110 sites have been established to offer anti- retroviral treatment (ART), while prevention of mother to child transmission centres (PMTCT) have been established in most hospitals to cater for pregnant women.
Condom usage has also increased from 28 to 33.4 per cent in women and from 44 to 52 per cent in men.
Despite these significant achievements, the Director General of the GAC Prof Sakyi Awuku-Amoah, contends that the nation is still confronted with many challenges that call for effective media involvement in the fight against the HIV pandemic.
He mentioned some of these challenges in his opening remarks at a workshop for journalists in Accra as the need to disseminate information to reduce high risk behaviour and personal risk exposures, stigma reduction, increasing ART therapy, since a large number of persons living with HIV (PLWAs) are not going for the anti- retroviral therapy, to help them manage the disease and prolong their life span.
He therefore charged the media to change their ‘sit-and-look attitude’ and assume a proactive role to addressing HIV and AIDS and help to showcase HIV and AIDS prevention interventions at all levels.
The workshop was organised by the GAC to build the capacity of participants in the ethics in order to give accurate reporting on HIV and AIDS, as part of this year’s World AIDS Day celebration, which falls on December 3. This year’s celebration is under the theme “Leadership: Reducing stigma and Discrimination.
Stigma and discrimination have greatly affected the fight against HIV and AIDS. This is because while only 10 per cent of the global population knew their HIV status, in Ghana, it was eight per cent.
This means that a lot of people do not know their status, while a large number of those who know their status and are in need of anti-retroviral treatment have refused to go for the treatment because of the fear of stigmatisation and discrimination. Consequently, only about 17,000 out of 71,000 PLWAs who need ART, go for medication. The question being asked is that why do we continue to stigmatise PLWAs to the extent that they refuse to go for their medication.
The opening remarks by the Prof Awuku-Amoah, and the presentations by Mr Cosmos Ohene-Adjei, a Sub-project Manager at the GAC and Mr Ato Amoaning of the League of HIV reporters set the tone for discussions.
Apart from the issue of PLWAs not accessing treatment as a result of stigmatisation, one of the issues that came up for discussion was whether prostitution should be legalised in view of the risk faced by commercial sex workers as a result of the HIV pandemic. Available reports indicate that a number of commercial sex workers are HIV-positive.
Conceding that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world which involves men, women, adults, children, the rich and the poor some participants indicated that some people engage in the business because of poverty, while other factors also make people to engage in prostitution, or seek the services of prostitutes.
Those who looked at the issue from the moral point of view contended that prostitution is a sin against God, since it involved the use of ones body, which is the temple of the Lord, for commercial sex purposes.
Others also said that the legalisation of prostitution would do more harm than good to the nation since it would encourage the youth to be promiscuous.
Some also debunked the argument that measures would be put in place to conduct a test on licensed prostitutes when it was legalised to ensure they operated without being infected with the virus, because nobody could be forced to undertake the HIV test since the test was voluntary.
In the light of these complexities and insecure formalities, they said legalisation of prostitution, which was a criminal act under the criminal Code 1960 (Act 29), had proved to be incapable of solving the HIV pandemic.
On the contrary, those in favour of the legalisation of prostitution maintained that, that action would provide structures to make sure that men and women or boys and girls who wanted to offer their bodies for sex for payment obtained license from an approved body and these prostitute shall be subjected to periodic HIV tests to make sure that none of them practised prostitution while infected.
T deal with low risk perception especially among the youth due to misconception and lack of adequate in-depth knowledge about HIV.
HIV is adevelopmental and social issue and all must come together to fight stigma and discrimination to deal with the spread of HIV by strengthening counselling services and intensifyig education to address the nagative thought that HIV is contracted through promiscuity.