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Mozambique: New Approach in HIV/Aids Awareness Campaigns
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Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)
14 December 2007
Posted to the web 14 December 2007
Maputo
The Maputo city authorities are to take HIV/AIDS campaigns to places where people gather as a new strategy to reduce the high infection rate, now estimated at 23 per cent.
Though the latest figures suggest that between 2004 and 2006 the national HIV prevalence rate dropped slightly - 16.2 to 16 per cent among adults aged between 15 and 49 - in Maputo city the rate increased from 20.7 to 23 per cent.
"We intend to conduct awareness campaigns for adults in places of gathering, instead of inviting them to specific meetings to convey these messages. This is one of the new approaches that we intend to adopt in the future", said Samuel Quive, the coordinator of the Maputo Provincial Nucleus for the Fight against AIDS.
"Markets, shows and other events bringing many people together - these are some of the places chosen for the new approach", he told reporters on Thursday, shortly after the opening of a meeting of the Provincial Civil Society Forum on HIV/AIDS.
"The current rate at which the disease is spreading is a cause for great concern", said Quive. "There are certain specific characteristics of Maputo city that may probably explain this increase, including the excessive consumption of alcohol, and the existence of many families with some members working in the South African mines (where rates of HIV infection are very high)".
But he also suggested that the figures may have been exaggerated as a result of people visiting Maputo from other provinces to take HIV tests.
'We cannot ignore the fact that infection rates in Maputo are increasing, but there are also many people coming from other provinces for tests and some who come to Maputo maternities for delivery. We have been encouraging people to undergo voluntary testing and to stop maternity deliveries outside health units", he said.
Another new measure to convey the HIV messages in the communities is to involve all makers of public opinion.
The participants to this two day meeting, coming from different organizations working in projects against HIV/AIDS, are to discuss the best ways to convey prevention messages.
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No less than 183 separate organizations have benefitted from funds granted by the National AIDS Council (CNCS), and quive claimed they had been doing a good job.
"These are very good results, though we are still far from the ideal situation", he said, adding that "the ideal is for us to have nobody behaving in a risky manner".
He said that this work is also positive among children orphaned by AIDS, who are now back to school after they had dropped out because they were being stigmatised.
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| Copyright © 2007 Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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