HIV/AIDS Archives - Page 3 of 6

April 7, 2011April 7, 2011

Health Experts Warn Against Drug Resistance Super-Bugs

Global health experts said on Thursday that the world’s most powerful drugs are losing the battle against drug-resistant strains of malaria, HIV, gonorrhea and tuberculosis

According to Dr. Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, antimicrobial resistance is robbing us of the certainty that antibiotics will always be there to fight infections and new drug-resistant pathogens are emerging. “It’s not enough to hope that we’ll have effective drugs to combat these infections. We must all act now to safeguard this important resource,” Frieden said

What you need to know about Anti-Microbial Resistance

What is Anti-Microbial Resistance:

Antimicrobial resistance occurs when germs change in a way that reduces or eliminates the effectiveness of drugs to treat them. This happens when antibiotics, antivirals, antifungals and other medications are used too liberally. About half of antimicrobial drugs — antibiotics in particular — are used unnecessarily or inappropriately prescribed in U.S. hospitals and in doctors’ offices, the CDC says. The best approach to preserving those drugs is to use them only when needed.

How Anti-Microbial Resistance affects developing world, especially Africa

HIV: Studies show that up to 20 percent of newly diagnosed HIV patients have transmitted a drug-resistant infection. Approximately 22 million people live with HIV in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the US and other developed countries, Doctors can test or resistance before prescribing drugs, but such luxury may be too hard to come by in under-privileged communities

Malaria: Plasmodium falciparum, the most dangerous of the malaria parasites, has developed resistance in nearly all areas of the world where it is transmitted. Annually, there are about 225 million malaria infections and nearly 800,000 deaths. Women and children are the most affected, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa.

March 13, 2011April 17, 2011

My HIV Problem and How I Got Cured

I have written a few of articles here in the past about some societal feelings towards our neighbors living with HIV or AIDS. My comments have centered on stereotypes and stigma associated with the disease and those who live with it. I did mention a friend of mine who contracted HIV and who, in the latter stages of his life, was completely abandoned by his own family for being sinful, perhaps.

If any of my articles appeared preachy to you, do not get mad at me yet, for I also had HIV problem. Mine was not the virus but I used to have the same troubled, prejudiced mindset about HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases, and I lived with the destructive and erosive ulcer of my thoughts for years.

As I mentioned in one of my previous articles, I heard about HIV for the first time 1986 and it was in a church, a common avenue in Ghana for the government to disseminate information to the public. The educators were a team of nurses and public health professionals from the Ministry of Health in Ghana sent by the government to tour communities and educate them about the new discovery, HIV. At that time, the information available to the instructors was scanty and only partially accurate. There is no doubt we’ve learned quite a lot about HIV in the past 25 years. The health-care professionals came to sow the seed and it was left to the laymen of the church to continue the campaign in order to keep their flock saved from this evil. I was young, but looking back I am embarrassed by how much misinformation we were fed then and the years that followed.

Week after week and month after month, HIV was presented to us as a disease that affects sinners, and individuals who disobey the Word of God. It was nothing less than God’s retribution to deviant lifestyles and a warning for us to return to God. I imbibed this into my spirit and, for years, I also saw people living with HIV as simply paying for their trespasses. Then I began to ‘grow’ and got to know ordinary people like me who are living more decent lives than I do but who are unfortunate to be living with HIV. The result is that I lay off the childish thoughts (I Corinthians 13.11). There are many who contracted the virus through the ‘sinful’ way we know, and there are many more that got it through the many things we all do in life and take for granted. One of these people is a girl, Elizabeth from South Africa. To cut my story short, I paste here, again, a quote from Elizabeth own words:

“My mother passed away when I was five and my father when I was 10. I have been staying with my grandmother since then. I tested HIV positive in 2008 when I was 16 after being sick for a long time. I developed sores all over my body that wouldn’t heal even after taking medicine. My grandmother and I were always in and out of hospital. I missed a lot of school. At first doctors thought I had diabetes since the sores were not healing.

“After the diabetes test came back negative the doctor recommended an HIV test. At first my grandmother was against the idea but after some time she agreed. I was shocked when the result came back positive because I had never had sex. My grandmother cried too, she was very sad but the doctor explained that I may have been born HIV positive. I was very angry and blamed my parents for giving me this disease. I was immediately put on antiretroviral drugs [ARVs] and my sores healed… I feel very strong and healthy… all I want is to continue helping other people affected and infected by HIV/AIDS in my community.”

Will this change the way you see that friend, family member or neighbor with HIV? I don’t know but I hope it does. It surely changes mine.

March 10, 2011April 1, 2011

South Africa: Opportunity for HIV Prevention That Works

Oprah Winfrey takes an HIV test in South Africa in 2007. The nation has one of the highest rates of HIV infection in the world

Joanne Brink

South Africa’s HIV/AIDS National Strategic Plan for health has two objectives – reducing the incidence of new HIV infections by half and placing 80% of those in need onto anti-retroviral treatment. As a country, we are making some progress in scaling up our national HIV treatment programmes, but concurrently we need to maintain the status of those that are HIV negative.

Over 95% of grade 8 to 12 learners are HIV negative. Although not preventative, testing for HIV in secondary schools presents a significant opportunity for establishing a culture of knowing your status, allowing for the enforcement of a healthy lifestyle. Yes, there are many concerns, but let us focus on addressing the concerns by involving learners and their parents in the design and implementation of any school health and HIV testing programme, rather than lose this opportunity. By instilling healthy habits and regular HIV testing amongst our teens of today and at an early age, we have a better chance of reducing new HIV infections amongst our adults of the future.

And make no mistake, many of our teens are having sex and are very much at risk of contracting HIV. A recent study conducted in Tshwane Municipality by The Foundation for Professional Development (FPD), a private institute of higher education, found that 40% of grade 8 to 12 learners are engaging in sexual activity, half of them with more than one sexual partner. However only 22% of these sexually active teens had been tested for HIV or thought they were at risk of contracting the disease. Yet, the vast majority reported that HIV was a topic discussed in their school at least once a month. This suggests that our current classroom model of delivering HIV prevention programmes to our learners is excelling on a theoretical manner, while the reactive behaviour that should stem from such knowledge is not evident.

Focus groups conducted through FPD’s HIV management courses for schools, have provided some insight into the reasons that HIV prevention is not working in our schools and how to improve on the current approach. Discussions in the grade 8 to 12 learner focus groups confirmed an extensive factual knowledge of HIV – learners were able to quote statistics and recite the majority of HIV transmission and prevention methods. Yet they did not see themselves at risk of contracting HIV, even though the majority reported to be sexually active.

The critical insight here is that learners are not able to relate to or internalise the meaning behind these “HIV facts” that they are being taught at school. According to them, the current HIV prevention messages are delivered through didactic classroom lectures – often emphasising abstinence – whereas they would prefer to engage in the open and have direct conversations about the reality of their lifestyles and sexual health, as young adults, rather than focusing on HIV only. They advised that we should not be “coming in saying HIV HIV”, but make the campaign part of a wider focus about looking after their overall health. “Talk to us about what has been happening in our lives and [then] compare it to HIV and AIDS – helping us to differentiate between the lives that we are living and the lives that we need to lead” – female Grade 12 learner.

A school based health screening and HIV testing campaign will give learners a chance to engage with counsellors and health workers, whether they choose to test for HIV or not. For many, this will be their first open conversation with an adult about sexual health and lifestyle choices. Broadening the school based HCT campaign from an exclusively HIV screening focus to an integrated health programme, as proposed by the departments of health and education, will help to make HIV testing routine amongst our teens. The pre- and post-test counselling experience will provide learners with the opportunity to ask direct questions and reflect on their own lifestyle and behavioural choices.

Furthermore, learners shared that their most trusted and valued source of information was their parents or caregivers. Yet their parents were unwilling and uncomfortable discussing sexual health matters or HIV with their children. The majority of parents believed that their role would be fulfilled once the “birds and bees” had been discussed once, whereas their teens craved regular conversations starting at a much younger age. Parents were however accused by their kids of being relatively uninformed about HIV and its effects. “They only know to tell us to use condoms to prevent HIV and that’s it. It would be nice to have parents who are informed about HIV. And if we could do something to inform our parents”- male Grade 12 learner. Although talking about sex to their parents would initially be awkward, learners yearned to do so and wanted to find a way to make the conversation easier for their parents.

A school health and HIV screening campaign is an opportunity for parents to become better informed and thereby help to open the conversation between parents and their teens. Parents should be encouraged to accompany their children for health and HIV screening at the school, not only for their own wellbeing, but so that they can better understand the emotions and questions that their children will face during an HIV test and can better provide ongoing support and compassion post-testing.

Grade 8 to 12 learners were born after the years when South Africa started responding to HIV and have grown up knowing about HIV and anti-retroviral treatment. This implying, that the messages to this group should be different to those of other generations.

School based HIV counselling and testing, integrated with a general health screening programme, is a chance for us to get HIV prevention right amongst our adults of the future. What is clear is that our teens have a lot of good advice to offer about how to improve HIV programmes that target youth. Involving them in the design of any school based health and HIV screening programme is critical to ensuring its success.

Joanne Brink works for Foundation for Professional Development (FPD) – The Foundation for Professional Development’s (FPD) vision is to build a better society through education and development, and the best place to start is with the foundation of society – our teachers – developing their ability to manage classrooms and inspiring them with the latest international teaching methodologies.

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March 10, 2011March 13, 2011

Cuts That Kill: The Senate Must Restore Global Health Funding

Joanne Carter

Executive director of RESULTS/RESULTS Educational Fund (REF)

Last week Congress approved a two-week extension of federal funding to avoid a looming government shutdown. The vote postpones — but does not resolve — potentially devastating cuts to global health programs. The House-proposed bill for the balance of 2011 proposes deep cuts to some of the most effective investments the US makes globally, including a drastic 40 percent reduction for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

In a recent interview Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter and advisor to President George W. Bush, called the cuts “irrelevant and destructive.” He’s right on both counts, and there’s still time for Congress to reverse course.

The cuts are irrelevant to the deficit problem that members of Congress are ostensibly trying to solve. Our entire foreign aid portfolio amounts to little more than a rounding error in the federal budget. Foreign aid focused on health, education, economic opportunity, and other anti-poverty programs account for less than 1 percent of federal spending. Even if Americans believed that erasing these programs was a good idea — and they don’t, as public opinion polls consistently reveal — it wouldn’t put a dent in the deficit.

These cuts are destructive because they would be measured in human lives.

With the U.S. as a leading donor, the Global Fund has helped save more than six million lives, and in just a decade has fundamentally altered our ability to fight AIDS, TB, and malaria, among the biggest killers on the planet. If the House proposal to slash $450 million from the Global Fund were adopted it would mean six million treatments for malaria would not be administered. More than 400,000 people won’t be provided with antiretroviral medication to treat AIDS, and nearly 60,000 women won’t receive the drugs they need to prevent transmission of HIV to their newborn children. More than 370,000 people won’t be tested and treated for tuberculosis, the world’s leading curable infectious killer of adults.

This budget crunch comes just as new tools are available to transform the fight against infectious diseases. A new way to diagnosis TB using a machine called Xpert is one such breakthrough. The current method of identifying TB bacteria under a microscope was developed nearly 130 years ago and is still used throughout the developing world. This method often fails to detect TB in people living with HIV/AIDS and in children, cannot detect drug resistance, and is frustratingly slow. Patients must take time off from work and family to return to a clinic and submit multiple specimens over several days — often an impossible demand in very poor communities. Although TB is curable, correctly and rapidly diagnosing the disease has been a major stumbling block.

Xpert has the potential to change that. It’s fast, accurate and easy to use. About the size of an espresso machine, it relies on DNA technology to diagnose TB, detects drug-resistant strains of the disease, and returns the results in about 90 minutes. That may not grab headlines, but in the world of TB control it’s nothing short of revolutionary.

Other breakthroughs abound. The promising trial results for a microbicide gel to prevent HIV transmission electrified the HIV/AIDS community in search of new prevention methods. Vaccines to help prevent pneumonia and diarrhea — the two leading killers of young children — are newly available in poor countries through the GAVI Alliance, an international partnership to expand access to childhood immunizations.

The question for Congress is whether global health policy and funding will keep up with global health evidence and opportunity.

The innovations in global health now at our fingertips are not just new drugs, vaccines, and diagnostics, but also the means of financing and delivering them. For example, The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has led the way in changing the business model for how aid is delivered. Last week the conservative-led UK government released an exhaustive multilateral aid review of 43 development institutions which rated the Global Fund as one of nine organizations with an “excellent track record” for delivering results. Global Fund proposals are developed by the countries who implement them, they are evaluated by an independent review panel, and continued funding is awarded according to performance. Project documents — everything from glowing reports to unforgiving audits — are made publicly available on the Fund’s website.

That may sound like common sense, but it’s not necessarily common practice among global health and development aid donors.

As a board member of the Global Fund, I see the Fund’s challenges up close, and I also see its ground-breaking model, its impact and the even greater potential it represents. The proven success of the Global Fund allows us to think about seizing the next set of opportunities presented by modern medicine and break the backs of the world’s greatest epidemics.

Congress faces unenviably tough budget decisions this year, but funding for these programs is not a close call. The Senate should reverse the House’s proposed cuts to global health for 2011, and restore this sliver of the federal budget that delivers unparalleled results. To do otherwise would be irrelevant and destructive.

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March 8, 2011

Empower African Women to Realize the African Dream

Obiageli Ezekwesili

It is hard not to be inspired by the widely-recognized economic growth story of Africa: more than a decade of robust growth for a region that has become a credible destination for investment and has rebounded from the global financial crisis faster than most other regions of the world.

International Women’s Day reminds us not only of the sacrifices and resilience of African girls and women, but of the missed opportunities to tackle the gender-related obstacles that keep half of Africa’s population out of the most vibrant economic sectors on the continent.

In Africa, the feminization of poverty still remains acute. One in 20 girls born today in Angola, Mozambique, Liberia and Sierra Leone will die in childbirth. An African woman is 25 times more likely to die during labour than a European woman. Girls still face genital mutilation in 28 African countries. More than 800,000 Africans, most of them female, are victims of human trafficking. Three young women are infected with HIV/AIDS for every young man in Africa.

The African woman, however, is also Africa’s face of hope, strength and opportunity. The rate of female entrepreneurship is higher in Africa than in any other region of the world. An African country – Rwanda – boosts the highest female representation in parliament. The primary enrollment rate has climbed from 84 girls for every 100 boys in 1991 to 91 in 2009.

Significant strides have been made on the path towards gender equity, but great challenges remain. The ratio of girls to boys in secondary school has barely moved in the last 18 years – from 76 girls per 100 boys to 79. In tertiary education, there are only 68 young women for every 100 males. In stark contrast to Rwanda, female representation in parliament across Sub-Saharan Africa is only about 18 percent.

The road to achieving the Millennium Development Goals in Africa can be built only on a gender-inclusive agenda, unleashing the productive power of women. That agenda should advance women’s education and access to information, protect women’s rights, improve women’s access to agricultural inputs and security over their land, promote female entrepreneurship, and increase the participation of women in government and public life. Urgent action in five key areas would help.

First, more African girls must go to and stay in school long enough to be armed with the skills essential for success. Girls need support at the secondary and post-secondary levels, where the crucial school-to-work transition is made. It is also vital for girls to acquire skills beyond the classroom – the kind that allow for innovation and entrepreneurship when faced with limitations.

Second, protecting women’s rights is essential for enhancing their access to economic mobility. Family laws on inheritance, marriage, labour markets and land rights are greater determinants of economic decision-making and empowerment than are business regulations. Legal restrictions on mobility, work outside of the home and control of personal assets are in dire need of reform in many African countries.

Third, women must gain access to productive resources. If women and men had the same access to agricultural inputs, productivity on women’s farms could increase by 10 to 30 percent. It will take innovative programs to provide women with these inputs and concerted action to protect their rights to land, ultimately altering the course of agricultural productivity for women, and for the continent.

Fourth, with African women currently absorbed by businesses concentrated in the less productive areas of the informal sector, breaking free will require access to credit – not just microfinance but to higher credit amounts at low interest rates with longer maturity terms. These need to be complemented by the right kind of technical support for female entrepreneurs, delivered in a timely fashion.

Progress is possible and can come swiftly, as primary school enrolment has shown. It cannot only be symbolic, though. While education is an essential starting point, it is only the first of many hurdles in shrinking the gender gap in earnings and empowerment.

Africa needs to hear the voice of the missing half, who can help set a more representative and inclusive agenda with the right priorities – including advocating for greater commitments for pro-poor, pro-children and pro-women policies and reforms.

Success will require that African governments work with citizens and the private sector, civil society, communities and Africa’s friends in the development community. It will require sustained political will and a commitment to enforce laws that strengthen the agenda on policies friendly to girls and women.

At the World Bank, we are bringing our contribution to help build a foundation for progress, keen to listen to the ideas of the poor and recognize that Africans must lead this process. Our “Road Map for Gender Mainstreaming” addresses gender challenges. Our Gender Action Plan fosters women’s access to land, agricultural inputs, infrastructure, labour markets and financial services, while our Adolescent Girls Initiative trains mentors and empowers young African women to transition to work.

Our private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation has invested a combined U.S. $170 million under a Gender Entrepreneurship Markets initiative which has benefited thousands of women in 23 sub-Saharan African countries.

The subject is close to our hearts. Gender equity and development will be the focus of the bank’s flagship World Development Report for 2012. It is one of the themes for our three-year funding period for 2011 to 2014, for which the bank has raised $49.3 billion to benefit the world’s poorest countries, 38 of them in Africa.

Last week, the bank’s board of executive directors endorsed our new Africa strategy. Among others, the tools for implementing the strategy – partnerships and knowledge – will leverage our funding to deepen and accelerate economic growth that generates jobs, is broad, diversified and inclusive. This will benefit the poor and women, on whom the well-being of children and future generations is so dependent.

So far, gender has been an obstacle, yet every obstacle is an opportunity in disguise. The expansion of economic and social empowerment of the African woman is the key to the realization of the African promise.

Obiageli Ezekwesili is the World Bank Vice President for the Africa region.

March 4, 2011March 5, 2011

African Countries Warned of Drug-Resistant HIV

African countries need to take steps to monitor and prevent the spread of drug-resistant HIV. This was the warning from researchers at the annual conference on retroviruses in Boston last week.

Evidence presented to the conference showed that people who had never taken antiretroviral (ARV) medicine were increasingly being infected with HIV that was resistant to common ARVs.

They were probably infected by people who had either stopped taking ARVs or their ARV treatment had failed.

Countries where ARV programmes have been running for a long time were most likely to report drug-resistant HIV.

In parts of Brazil, for example, almost 20 percent of people tested had HIV that was resistant to at least one ARV.

In a study of almost 2 500 people in six African countries, drug resistance was highest in Uganda, which introduced ARVs earlier than the other countries surveyed, including South Africa and Nigeria.

At three Ugandan sites, almost 12 percent of people who had never been on ARVs before were infected with drug-resistant HIV.

Uganda was one of the first African countries to introduce ARVs, but in the mid-1990s some people were treated with one or two ARVs because of the exorbitant costs.

As the HI virus mutates easily, three different ARVs need to be taken at the same time every day for the patient’s entire life to prevent drug resistant HIV mutations.

In Uganda, there was most resistance to nevirapine and efavirenz, two of the most common ARVs used in Africa. Nevirapine has also been used for a number of years to prevent mothers from infecting their children with HIV.

PharmAccess, which conducted the African study, estimated that the risk of resistance increased by 38 percent for each year of ARV provision.

PharmAccess’s Dr Raph Hamers also reported on a study of young, newly infected Ugandans run last year which showed that over 8 percent had drug-resistant HIV.

A World Health Organisation (WHO) survey identified a number of factors that could drive the spread of drug-resistant HIV in Africa, including patients dropping out of ARV programmes, picking up their medication late and clinics running out of ARVs.

(AllAfrica)

March 1, 2011March 2, 2011

Africa: Rape and Other Sexual Abuse are Robbing Millions of Children of a Future, UNESCO Report

Widespread rape and other sexual violence are depriving millions of children of an education in conflict-affected countries, UNESCO’s 2011 Global Monitoring Report warns.

The report, “The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education,” calls for an end to the culture of impunity surrounding sexual violence, with strengthened monitoring of human rights violations affecting education, a more rigorous application of existing international law and the creation of an International Commission on Rape and Sexual Violence, backed by the International Criminal Court.

The international courts set up in the wake of the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the genocide in Rwanda have firmly established rape and other sexual violence as war crimes, yet these acts remain widely deployed weapons of war.

Of the rapes reported in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), one-third involved children (and 13% are against children under the age of 10). Unreported rape in conflict-affected areas of in the east of the country may be 10 to 20 times the reported level. That would translate into 130,000 to 260,000 incidents in 2009 alone.

In the report, 15-year-old Minova from South Kivu province in DRC describes her experience. “I was just coming back from the river to fetch water. … Two soldiers came up to me and told me that if I refuse to sleep with them, they will kill me. They beat me and ripped my clothes. One of the soldiers raped me. …My parents spoke to a commander and he said that his soldiers do not rape, and that I am lying. I recognized the two soldiers, and I know that one of them is called Edouard.”

Sexual violence damages education on many levels. Girls subjected to rape often experience grave physical injury – with long-term consequences for school attendance. The psychological effects, including depression, trauma, shame and withdrawal, have devastating consequences for learning. Many girls drop out of school after rape because of unwanted pregnancy, unsafe abortion and sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS, as well as other forms of ill health, trauma, displacement or stigma.

Robbing children of a secure home environment and traumatizing the communities that they live in profoundly impairs prospects for learning. Sexual violence creates a wider atmosphere of insecurity that leads to a decline in the number of girls able to attend school.

Many countries that have emerged from violent conflict – including Guatemala and Liberia – continue to report elevated levels of rape and sexual violence, suggesting that practices that emerge during violent conflict become socially ingrained. While the majority of victims are girls and women, boys and men are at risk in some countries.

The report describes monitoring systems for rape and other sexual violence as among the weakest in the international system with United Nations agencies and others relying on a fragmented and often anecdotal body of evidence.

The report calls for change on four major fronts:

An International Commission on Rape and Sexual Violence should be established to document the scale of the problem, identify perpetrators and assess government responses. The Under-Secretary-General for UN Women should head the commission, with national review exercises coordinated through the Office of the Secretary-General’s Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict.
All governments in conflict-affected states should be called upon to develop national plans for curtailing sexual violence, drawing on best practices. Donors and United Nations agencies should coordinate efforts to back these plans.
Strengthen United Nations coordination to combat sexual violence. The United Nations Entity on Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women — UN Women — should be mandated, resourced and equipped to coordinate action across the United Nations system and oversee enforcement of Security Council resolutions.
The International Criminal Court could play a far more active role in enforcing Security Council Resolutions, and could inform United Nations, regional and national efforts to document levels of rape and other sexual violence, establish benchmarks for combating impunity, provide training, and strengthen the role of women in local and national leadership positions.

Mary Robinson, co-chair of the Civil Society Advisory Group to the UN on Women, Peace and Security, writes in the report: “Children living with the psychological trauma, the insecurity, the stigma, and the family and community breakdown that comes with rape are not going to realize their potential in school.

That is why it is time for the Education for All community to engage more actively on human rights advocacy aimed at ending what the UN Secretary-General has described as “our collective failure” to protect those lives destroyed by sexual violence.” The hidden crisis: Armed conflict and education, cautions that the world is not on track to achieve by 2015 the six Education for All goals that over 160 countries signed up to in 2000. Although there has been progress in many areas, most of the goals will be missed by a wide margin – and conflict is one of the major reasons.

The report is endorsed by four Nobel Peace Prize laureates: Oscar Arias Sánchez, Shirin Ebadi, José Ramos-Horta and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Introducing the report, Archbishop Tutu says: “It documents in stark detail the sheer brutality of the violence against some of the world’s most vulnerable people, including its schoolchildren, and it challenges world leaders of all countries, rich and poor, to act decisively.” Of the total number of primary school age children in the world who do not attend school, 42% – 28 million – live in poor countries affected by conflict.[ad#Adsense-200by200sq]

February 27, 2011

Ghana: Eastern Region takes steps to reduce HIV/AIDS prevalence rate

Koforidua, Feb. 27, GNA – The Eastern Regional AIDs Committee is to organize HIV Counseling and Testing on May Day at the Jacksons Park to enable workers to know their statuses.

This is to help to reduce the HIV prevalence rate in the region of about 4.2 per cent, the highest in the country.

This came to light at a review and planning meeting by the Committee at Koforidua on Friday to strategize on the measures to take to help to further reduce the rate.

The region used to have a prevalence of over six per cent.

The Committee also planned to reorganize the quarterly review meeting with the district focal persons.

Speaking to the Ghana News Agency, the Regional HIV/AIDs Focal Person, Mr Kwame Oppong-Ntim, said during the year, the Committee would also hold meetings with organizations running various HIV/AIDs programmes in the region to monitor what they were doing.

He said, the members of the Committee would also visit institutions such as the prisons and orphanages in the region to find out what measures were being taken to help to reduce the HIV infections.

GNA