HIV/AIDS: NACA Seeks General Testing To Check Spread …As Focus Shifts To COVID-19

Following increase in HIV infection in Nigeria, the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), has called for testing of the general population in order to ascertain new infections, and placement of infected persons on treatment.
Making the call recently in an exclusive interview in Port Harcourt, the Director, Research, Monitoring and Evaluation in NACA, Dr Greg Ashefor, hinted that this level of testing would be the best to check the current trend of the virus in the country.
Dr Ashefor noted that what partners in the country are doing is “strategic testing”, which identifies specific publics such as pregnant women, identified key populations (men having sex with men, female sex workers, etc).
“Partners cannot do the general population testing. What the partners are doing is strategic testing. Government should do more testing by testing the general public, called ‘testing for prevention’, as many people are in the state they should be able to ascertain their status”, he said.
He explained that such general testing for the population should be followed by treatment in what he called “Test and Treat”.
“The more you link them (new infections) to treatment, the more you attain viral control, viral suppression, the more you will control the HIV epidemic.
“So, the way we can get to zero transmission, and zero death by 2030 is for more people to be tested”, he said.
Meanwhile, Dr Greg Ashefor has noted that the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic has shifted attention from HIV to the pandemic, thus, affecting HIV/AIDS data documentation.
“You can see from the data they presented from 18th March to May 2020, that data has dropped due to disruption of services and data documentation”, he said.
The reason, he stated, is because “even in the laboratories, they mobilised technicians to do COVID-19 work even in Teaching Hospitals”.

By:  Sogbeba Dokubo