Southern African nations on Tuesday mulled ways to rope high-risk groups into the fight against HIV/Aids in the world’s worst-affected region as they started a three-day meeting in Malawi.
The meeting will hammer out a ”comprehensive strategy on how to accelerate prevention, and we are addressing key drivers of the epidemic in terms of prevention”, said Stephen Sianga, an official from the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
”Yes, the problem of sexual workers and gays is there … why stigmatise this group, as our strategy is multipronged and we want to cover all risk groups,” said Sianga, who is in charge of social and human development at the SADC secretariat.
Southern Africa is the epicentre of the pandemic, accounting for a third of global HIV infections.
It is also grappling with the heaviest death toll from Aids. A total of 1,2-million out of the worldwide toll of 2,8-million people died from Aids-related illnesses last year in Southern Africa.
Roy Hauya, director of policy and programmes at Malawi’s National Aids Commission, said the meeting would also try to come up with a strategy on male circumcision.
”We want to determine what role circumcision can play to accelerate prevention … as a region we are not experienced in programming male circumcision” as a tool to control the spread of HIV, he said. ”There is evidence that in regions where the majority of men are circumcised, HIV infection is lower than in regions where circumcision is not practised.”
Five Southern African countries hard hit by the Aids pandemic — Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Tanzania and Zambia — are in talks with the United Nations Joint Programme on HIV/Aids on making circumcision more accessible to men.
The new strategy follows the results of a three-year study in a South African township — Orange Farm near Johannesburg — that showed that circumcision reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 60%.
Less than 20% of men are said to be circumcised in Southern Africa, where HIV prevalence is the highest.
Malawi’s Health Minister, Marjorie Ngaunje, set the tone for the meeting by saying: ”To make advances in prevention, we must begin to tackle honestly the difficult questions that the epidemic raises … addressing positively the needs of sex workers and of men who have sex with men.”
She said the fight against HIV/Aids ”will take a better turn if we stop doing business as usual … we must address the real drivers of the epidemic and target groups that are most vulnerable”.
Omotayo Olaniyan, African Union regional delegate to the SADC, told the meeting that poor provision of services for sex workers and drug users has allowed HIV to take root in society’s most vulnerable populations.
Olaniyan said young people and women are also vulnerable to infection due to poverty and their lack of control over their sex lives in male-dominated societies. ”These are the heart of the acceleration of the spread of HIV,” he said.
He said Southern Africa is the ”epicentre” of the pandemic, since a third — or 32 % — of all people with HIV worldwide live in the region, and 34% of all deaths arising from Aids in 2006 occurred in Southern Africa. ”You will agree with me that these are not acceptable developments … it is a well-known fact that we are not yet winning the war against HIV and Aids.”
The SADC groups Angola, Botswana, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe. — Sapa-AFP