Towards HIV/AIDS Eradication In Nigeria

Osagie Enahire

Recently, the Federal
Government re-emphasised its commitment in streng-thening the health sector towards achieving the global goal of eliminating HIV/AIDS by the year 2030. The minister of health, Dr Osagie Enahire who stated this at a news conference to mark the 2015 World AIDs Day with the theme “Getting to Zero: Ending HIV/AIDS by 2030” recently, said that the theme was aimed at zero new HIV infection, zero discrimination and zero AIDs-related deaths.
The health minister maintained that any increase in HIV/AIDS new cases would impact negatively on the health and economy of the nation, revealing that about 3.4 million Nigerians are living with HIV as at the end of 2014 out of the 36.9 million persons living with the virus globally. He maintained that tackling the root causes of vulnerability remained the sure way to achieving the goals.
During the World AIDS Day celebration, the Rivers State Government embarked on free voluntary medical test and treatments across the 23 local government areas as part of the event to mark the World AIDs Day. It was to exploit the services of medical experts in the state to freely handle all such cases towards eradicating HIV/AIDs scourge before 2030.
On its part, the Global Association for War Against AIDS (GAWA), on the sidelines of a sensitisation programme for parents, advised them to educate their children and wards on HIV/AIDS to help reduce the burden of the disease in Nigeria. The Education Officer of GAWA, Mrs Tinuke Lawal while speaking with newsmen in Lagos said it was aimed at teaching parents diverse ways of preventing children from contracting the scourge called AIDS disease. According to Mrs Lawal, parents should educate their children in primary schools as to help them gain knowledge on how to avoid practices that may put them at risk of HIV/AIDS because it is real. “The children need to know about it now that they are little”.
The National Agency for Control of AIDS (NACA) embarked on a free HIV counseling programme aimed at covering 30 states of the federation. NACA Head of Subsidy Reinvestment and Empowerment Programme (SURE-P), Dr Rosemary Adu explained that the programme was a component of the Presidential Comprehensive Response Plan to test 50 million Nigerians for HIV between 2014 and 2015. The plan, she said include free medical care for multiple disease such as malaria, diabetes and hypertension as well as HIV treatment to an additional 600,000 HIV positive patients across the country.
Indeed, one major obstacle to African prosperity in general and Nigeria in particular is Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS). Despite all the advances of modern medicine, life expectancy has continued to fall in much of African countries in the past decades. The human Immune-deficiency Virus (HIV) destroys the body’s immune system. More than 30 million Africans are infected with HIV and three quarters of the World’s AIDS deaths occur in Africa as nearly five Africans die of the disease every minute.
Among the most important development issues facing Nigeria is how to strengthen the health sector and improve the overall health status of the population. The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce maternal and child mortality in Nigeria cannot be achieved without major improvements in the health status of Nigerian women and children.
Generally, Nigeria is making very slow progress on health-related issues, including maternal and child health indicators compared to most other African countries. Findings have shown that HIV/AIDS prevalence rate is highest in Rivers State, Nigeria. Nigerians are vulnerable to infection because they are poor and lack adequate or sufficient information and education that will keep them away from the scourge. Another factor is that the government which is responsible to take HIV/AIDS case seriously is not doing that, and the cost of preventive vaccine and its management and control are enormous.
Nigeria is currently treating no fewer than 800,000 people living with the virus with the Anti Retroviral (ARV) drug while the federal ministry of health is collecting data of infected persons. Despite the fact that 2014 surveys showed a decline in HIV cases among pregnant women who attend antenatal clinics to 3.0 percent compared to 4.1 percent in 2010, a decline among youths from 6.0 percent in 2001 to 2.9 percent in 2014, government has a lot to do.
There is need for collaboration among stakeholders in the pursuit of preventing and eradicating HIV/AIDS, particularly among adolescents and youths, mother-child transmission as well as accessibility to care and treatment to enable the country achieve the 2030 deadline.
In spite of the remarkable progress in the level of prevention, treatment and care for those living with the virus in Africa and in the world, what is more important is the production of drugs that will cure the virus completely. Most African governments including Nigeria and their partners have made significant financial investments in the HIV/AIDS response but major gaps are still left unfilled in stigma, discrimination and punitive laws persisting in the sub-saharan Africa, which is mostly affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic with nearly 26 million people living with the virus while 800,000 HIV deaths occurred in 2014.
Although HIV prevalence is much lower in Nigeria than in other African countries such as South Africa and Zambia, the size of Nigeria’s population of about 170 million indicates that by now, the rate has risen higher than that of 2014. With AIDS claiming so many lives, Nigeria’s life expectancy has declined significantly. To be candid, Nigeria has a general HIV epidemic but the prevalence varies widely across states and rural or urban areas.
Concentrated HIV/AIDS epidemics occur in particular geographic regions and within certain segments of the population. Nigeria’s epidemic is largely fueled by intersexual and mother-to-child transition, but there are clear identifiable risk groups similar to those in many other African countries. According to the 2007 integrated Bio-Behavioral Surveillance Survey, this is evidenced in a significantly higher infection rate among most-at-risk populations, including commercial sex workers, injecting drug users, and men who sex their fellow men or homosexuals.
Poverty speeds the epidemic’s spread as many Africans and Nigerians cannot afford antibiotics, and so cannot cure other sexually transmitted diseases, which leave them with open sores through which the HIV virus can pass. Migration and war help the virus to cross borders while traders, labourers, tourists and sailors etc. flock from the poorest African countries and even the western world, to the other parts of the world.
At holiday periods such as Christmas, they go home or other places and infect their wives and other persons. Truck drivers and other transporters, soldiers and police as well as miners who often live in single-sex hostels for months or years are surrounded by prostitutes and they carry the virus for thousands of miles, from one rest-stop brothel to another. Wars create surges of refugees, some of whom have no other means of support but commercial sex,  all these are disdain for risk and are more likely to contract HIV and horribly prone to spread it forcefully.
Frankly speaking, many adult populations have been having unsafe sex on bed and behind bushes, so it may be impossible to curb the epidemic. Some young women in Nigeria believe that without regular infusions of sperm, they will not grow up to be beautiful and in some parts of Nigeria, men believe that they can cleans themselves of the virus by passing it on to a virgin, just as some think they can achieve the same effect by having sex with a madwoman.
AIDS has devastated many African families and it strikes people in their productive prime, so it has become imperative to reinvigorate all the measures put in place to eradicate the scourge worldwide. A few countries, notably Uganda and Senegal, have, however, fought the epidemic with great success. Uganda, after a laud and inventive anti-AIDS Campaign, adult HIV prevalence crashed from 30 percent in 1992 to 5 percent in 2002.
Nigerian governments should devise more proactive medical policy that will ensure absolute cure of AIDS and other sexually contracted diseases, while there should be regular supply of the available drugs.
Nigerians should cultivate the habit of subjecting themselves to regular medical tests for their well-being while parents should lecture their children on sex education as ignorance of parents and adults on sex education has caused a lot of harm to them and their children. Young men and women should stay away from unprotected sex and make sure they use condom and stick to one sex  partner to avoid HIV.

Shedie Okpara