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Uganda: Aids - ABC Approach Still Necessary
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The Monitor (Kampala)
EDITORIAL
1 December 2007
Posted to the web 30 November 2007
As we celebrate World Aids Day, the latest news is that the epidemic has levelled off following a downward revision of official global statistics. The World Health Organisation and the UN Aids agency, UNAids, now say the estimated number of people living with HIV/Aids globally is 33.2 million not 39.5 million.
The alteration came as a result of improved methodology, better surveillance by countries and changes in the key epidemiological assumptions used to calculate the estimates.
On face value, this appears to be good news especially for planning purposes. But this does not mean that the epidemic is under control. In some countries, the levelling off has occurred at unacceptably high rates, meaning that more effort is required.
In Uganda, where more than a million people are said to be living with HIV/Aids, data from urban and most rural surveillance sites indicate an overall levelling off of prevalence during the current decade.
This, according to UNAids, shows that the epidemic is masking a situation in which many people are becoming infected and equal numbers are dying. Matters are not helped as several national population-based surveys conducted over the years since 1995 show that higher risk sex has been increasing.
This is not only happening amongst adults but also in younger men and women who are increasingly having sex with non-regular partners as the 2006 demographic and health survey indicates.
Now, this is a worrying trend and an unfortunate predicament for a country that has been the success story in the fight against HIV/Aids. We made history the world over when we brought down prevalence from 21 percent in 1991 to a dramatic 5 percent in 2001. But we failed to sustain that and the prevalence now stands at an unacceptable 6.7 percent.
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The success that we registered was pegged onto a holistic approach that among others enlisted the political support of President Museveni in addition to several interventions, with the ABC (Abstinence, Being faithful and Condom use] approach standing out most.
As experts have argued, policy shifts especially influenced by the strings attached to funding from the American government have had a bad impact on the fight against the pandemic.
The Bush Administration wants most of its funding to go into abstinence and fidelity. No condoms. There is, however, an urgent need to revive the kind of prevention efforts that turned Uganda into a success story in fighting HIV/Aids.
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