Youth form 40% of HIV patients
TIMES NEWS NETWORK
Panaji: HIV/ AIDS has been found to have a profound impact on teens and young adults and nearly 40% of new HIV infections and almost one-third of the global total of people living with the disease are aged between 15 and 24.
In Goa, about 23% of the detected HIV cases in 2007 belonged to the age group 15-29, said Goa State AIDS Contol Society (GSACS) project director Dr Pradeep Padwal.
Dr Padwal said that while more than one-third of the females infected belong to the age group 15-29 in the state, about one-fifth of the infected males belonged to this age group.
“Males and females were almost equally infected in the age group 15-29, whereas in the higher age groups the proportion of males around 70%,” he said.He was speaking at a media consultation programme ‘A coordinated response to HIV/AIDS in Goa- Building partnerships with the media’ on Tuesday, which was organised by Zindagi, a state network of people living with HIV in collaboration with Centre for Advocacy and Research (CFAR) under the aegis of Indian network of people living with HIV.
Dr Padwal said, “The government has taken good measures to effectively control the epidemic in the last ten years and the HIV spread has plateaued in the last three years.”
Observing that HIV /AIDS which was considered as a
male disease two decade ago, is now distributed almost equally among male and female, he said that more than one-third of the females infected during 2007 in Goa were in the age group 15-29 as compared to less than one-fifth of the infected males.
He said that women are more vulnerable than men to HIV infection because of biological, economic, social and cultural factors. “Male-to-female transmission is 2 to 17 times higher than vice versa. While the proportion of females to total HIV cases detected was about 35.7% in 2007, it ranged between 10 to 12 % during 1995-98,” Dr Padwal observed.
Goa along with Gujarat and Pondicherry are moderate prevalent states and trends indicate that HIV spreads from urban to rural areas and from high-risk groups (HRG) to low risk group (LRG).
“The time lag for the infection to spread from HRG to LRG is 3 to 5 years, as the infection will spread from CSWs to their clients that act as the bridge population and then to wives/ other sexual partners of these clients during the period,” he said.
According to him, the future course of the epidemic will largely depend on efforts in preventing HIV infection among young people.
“For this we have to form strategies to help young people to protect themselves, access to sound information, help to build skills for living, provide a safe and supportive environment as well as quality health services including counseling and also there is a need for special skills and ways of communicating with children,” said Dr Padwal.
To catch people young, the director of GSACS believes that schools are important channels.
“Teachers are the key people who influence children’s behaviour and easy accessibility of young children in different age group to impart age appropriate knowledge,” he added.
June 25, The Times of India, Goa edition
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AIDS: No Way Out
-Mohammad Khairul Alam-
-Executive Director-
-Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foudation-
-24/3 M. C. Roy Lane-
-Dhaka-1211, Bangladesh-
-Email: rainbowngo@gmail.com-
-Web: www.newsletter.com.bd-
-Tell: 880-2-8628908-
-Mobile: 88-01711344997-
The epidemics in many countries of South Asia are now entering a new phase. One of the first populations to be affected by HIV in South Asia were injecting drug users. In areas where drug injection has been long established, such as Manipur in north-eastern India, HIV prevalence rates of over 40 percent have been recorded for several years. Several hundred thousand people infected during the explosive start of epidemics are becoming ill and are undergoing treatment. The treatment of infections becomes a great burden for the country concerned, because HIV/AIDS requires long-term and effective medical care, periodical hospital-based care and trained manpower to provide comprehensive healthcare services. For countries where resources are scarce, easy access to treatment and care remain very questionable and prohibitive for many PLWHAs. (people live with HIV/AIDS)
Globally, more or less 40 million people that are infected with HIV/AIDS, Every day 14,000 getting infected and 6,000 are young of them; approximately 95% live in severely resource-constrained settings. In 2005, there were 4.9 million new infected. That means every year add 4.9 million people swap over burden in globally which were potential in the before recent year. If this situation continues there will be burden people increase day by day, and country lost dynamic potential manpower. There is another important argument to take up the challenge: HIV/AIDS mainly affects adults in their productive prime, leaving the very young and old to cope alone. This severely hampers economic growth and development of countries concerned.
Some times poverty facilitates the spread of HIV/AIDS, but equally HIV/AIDS affect poverty. Generalizing HIV/AIDS into a problem of poverty will paralyze an effective and specific response to it. By nature of the population it affects, the economic and developmental impact of HIV/AIDS is likely to be much greater than that of other major infectious diseases or deadly diseases, It is parallel call epidemic other major deadly diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhea etc.
Sex workers may be an at-risk population with circumstances and motivations that differ from other high-risk persons. This study shed light on how a person perceives being at risk. Views of ones’ sex partner(s) as the source of risk, rather than one’s own behaviour, appear to affect how people make sense of their sexual activity and decide on protective measures. For sex workers, due to their occupation, these processes induce them to self-identify as being at risk, while other high-risk persons may find denial easier to maintain. However, conditions of their occupation negate sex workers from making those changes most often made by other high-risk persons (fewer partners, monogamy, and consistent condom use). How this relates to getting tested for HIV, and factors that reduce testing differ between male and female sex workers, with economics and access being stronger factors among the female sex workers.
Bangladesh is a high prevalence of sexually transmitted diseases, particularly among commercial sex workers; there are available injection drug users and sex workers all over the country, low condom use in the general population. Considering the high prevalence of HIV risk factors among the Bangladeshi population, HIV prevention research is particularly important for Bangladesh. It is very awful, several organization in Bangladesh are working only to prevent HIV/AIDS but few of them like as ‘Rainbow Nari O Shishu Kallyan Foundation’ try to develop proper strategic plane, so should increase research based organization recently.
Sources: USAID, UNICEF, World Bank
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