Move fast to halt spread of killer HIV and AIDS

“According to data of the national programme for prevention and control over HIV and AIDS, the number of newly-registered people stands at 204 as of November 25, 2015”, Dr Varleva noted.

AIDS is a disease that can only be developed in people who earlier contracted the HIV virus.

The Minister of State for Health, Dr. Osagie Ehanire, revealed the statistics yesterday in Abuja during World AIDS Day celebration with the theme: “Getting to Zero: Ending HIV/AIDS by 2030”. The remaining 11% involve HIV transmission through injection drug use.

World AIDS Day is held on December 1 every year and is an opportunity for people throughout the world to unite in the fight against HIV, show their support for people living with HIV and to commemorate people who have died.

And a World Health Organization report added that the number of new infections has fallen by 35 per cent since the turn of the century. He, however, pointed out that more efforts need to be put in the HIV response as 23 million people are still living with HIV without treatment.

“People still living with HIV are still fighting the fight, but eventually we’ll have a world where we don’t need to fight the fight”.

Religious communities can also turn policymakers’ attention to efforts targeted at disease prevention and treatment, and many religious nonprofits have done exactly that over the past 30 years, wrote Katherine Marshall, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs, for The Huffington Post.

Free rapid HIV testing is available this week in the Lehigh Valley.

By then Non Government Organisations like Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) and other stakeholders entered into a bitter struggle with the administration of the day, to ensure that such ARVs are rolled out in public hospitals, as many people were dying.

Idoko said the day was being marked since 1988 to sensitise people about HIV and give hope to those living with the virus. The disease is also “sexist”: seventy-four percent of adolescents in Africa who contract HIV are girls, making AIDS a leading cause of death for young women there.

According to the Health Ministry, in the first 11 months of this year 676 new cases of AIDS were revealed. It was only after her mother died that her father told her: she was born with HIV.