By Shipra Prakash
26 May 2008 [MEDIAGLOBAL]: Young people infected with HIV/AIDS still do not have adequate access to health care, according to the Global Youth Coalition on HIV/AIDS (GYCA) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA).
Along with the International Labour Organization (ILO), UNAIDS, and the Permanent Mission of Jamaica, GCYA and UNFPA organized a briefing at the United Nations last week on the access young people infected with the disease have to medical care.
According to GYCA, an estimated 33.2 million people were living with HIV in 2007, and 5.4 million of them were young people between the ages of 15 to 24.
Inadequate health care for young people infected with HIV/AIDS can impose barriers to their integration into society. One of the panelists, Dr. Senendra Raj Upreti, from the Ministry of Health and Population in Nepal, highlighted the lack of health care and recommended that the government should “scale up” information centers and train health workers to provide youth-friendly services in Nepal.
Kenya, a country which has high prevalence of HIV/AIDS, also faces the challenge of reaching out to youth infected by the disease and providing them with adequate health care.
Another panelist, Veronicah Omunga, a Program Assistant of the Network of African People Living with HIV/AIDS, said that the fear of discrimination has meant reluctance by people to disclose their condition in Kenya.
Because boarding schools in Kenya are known to provide a good education, children are usually sent to them. But those who are infected with HIV/AIDS cannot gain access to treatment because they fear disclosing their condition, said Omunga.
She stated that “there’s a need for the government to assist young people living with HIV/AIDS in boarding schools to gain access to treatment.”
There is also lack of treatment for pregnant women infected with HIV/AIDS. According to the UNAIDS 2007 Epidemic Update, only 11 percent of pregnant women had access to antiretrovirals (AV) for the prevention of mother-to-child HIV transmission in 2007.
This has negative consequences for the unborn children. Rowena Johnston, Vice President of Research at amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, told MediaGlobal that “pregnant women with access to AV can prevent or certainly improve the chance of not transmitting HIV to the baby.”
Educating youth about the virus still remains a challenge. According to a Progress Report in 2007 called “Towards Universal Access, Scaling Up Priority HIV/AIDS Interventions in the Health Sector,” prepared by the World Health Organization(WHO), UNAIDS and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in 2001, governments had pledged that 90 percent of young people would be able to identify modes of HIV transmission and prevention.
But this has not been achieved. Only 40 percent of young males and 36 percent of young females had accurate HIV knowledge as of 2007.
Access to condoms remains a crucial consideration. Joya Banerjee, Co-Founder and Program Director of GYCA told MediaGlobal that “access to condoms is very low.”
But the lack of access to condoms could be connected with the promotion of abstinence policies. “Some countries have been doing a good job promoting condoms but others promote abstinence only. For example, in Uganda, pressure from the United States means people are not allowed to distribute condoms in schools,” Banerjee said.
This month, the journal Science issued a report called ‘Reassessing HIV Prevention.’ The authors of the report stated that fewer sexual partnerships can make a significant difference in containing the spread of the deadly virus.
Malcolm Potts, Professor in Population and Family Planning at the University of California – Berkeley’s School of Public Health and one of the authors of the study, was not very enthusiastic about the promotion of condoms. He told MediaGlobal that HIV testing and condom use “make little difference in a generalized epidemic.”
However, Steve Kraus, Chief of HIV and AIDS at UNFPA, told MediaGlobal that “there has to be a combination of treatment and prevention. There’s no single magic bullet.”
“There should be a combination of preventive strategies such as abstinence, fidelity in stable relationships and condoms,” he added.