About 800,000 people in Nigeria are currently undergoing treatment on HIV/AIDS case, the Executive Director of United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Dr Michel Sidibe, has said.
The UNAIDS executive director, who said this when his team paid a courtesy call on the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, yesterday, added that there are still 50,000 babies born annually in the country with HIV infection.
Sidibe said, “Already, there is a decline in new HIV infections in the country, as there is about 800,000 people in the country that are undergoing treatment.”
According to him, ending HIV infection in Nigeria will send a positive message across the world.
However, Sidibe noted that the huge number of babies born with HIV infection yearly in the country was very unnecessary.
Reacting, Osinbajo said that access to healthcare is “a poverty issue, and must be put in that perspective.”
He explained that it was for the same reasons that the Buhari administration put the “half a trillion Naira in the 2016 budget, the largest single budgetary item of any government ever on social investments programmes,” that address poverty.
The Vice President was referring to the six social investment plans of the Muhammadu Buhari presidency which include creation of 500,000 teaching jobs for unemployed graduates; 370,000 youth to be taken through vocational training and skills acquisition, and paid while doing so; conditional cash transfer programme where one million extremely poor Nigerians would be paid N5,000 per month in 2016; home-grown school feeding programme where the Federal Government provides one-meal-a-day to primary school pupils across the country; free education for tertiary education students in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics; and a one-time N60,000 loan to market women, artisans and traders through a micro credit scheme using the Bank of Industry.
All the programmes have been provided for in the 2016 budget, the Vice President restated, adding that they are means of reducing poverty and vulnerabilities.
He stated that access to treatment by patients of HIV/AIDS, as in other diseases, was an equality issue “because the vast majority of people who need help are those who can’t afford it.”
The vice president said the Federal Government will ramp up funding for healthcare in the country and work with the United Nations to eliminate Mother-to-Child transmission of HIV/AIDS, expanding treatment for patients, and spurring local manufacture of the anti-retroviral drugs, the three major issues the UNAIDS director tabled before him at the meeting.