Government should act fast before we all catch HIV

The UNAIDS this week released a report indicating that 570 young girls aged between 15 and 24 in Uganda contract HIV/Aids every week. This translates into more than 310,000 infections in a year among this age group.

This is a scenario to be worried about, especially when we consider the infection multiplier effect given that each of these infected girls is likely to infect two more people by end of year.
The report shows that HIV infection rates among the 15-24 female age-group are worse than those of our neighbours Kenya (468 cases), Tanzania (491) and Rwanda (25) per week and the prevalence among our females aged 20-24 remains outrageously high at over 7 per cent, above the national average of a 6.5 per cent per year. On the continent, the report also puts Uganda second only to South Africa in HIV infections among women.

It is embarrassing that Uganda, which used to be a role model for other countries in the fight against HIV/Aids is becoming a case study which countries are running away from.
Although a Ministry of Health official attributed the infections to cross-generational sex where older rich men date young girls especially at university and other tertiary institutions, the problem appears much bigger and points to serious laxity in our original strategies that brought HIV spread from a high 30 per cent in the early 1990s down to less than two digits by 2000.

The UNAIDS findings are a rude wake-up call for the government and other players in the fight against HIV. It is disturbing that at a time when countries are moving towards zero HIV infections, in Uganda the deadly virus is spreading like bush fire and threatening to consume the whole population.

Every year, government, development partners and civil society organisations commit billions of shillings towards combating HIV prevalence yet the infection rates are not receding and in some sections of society, for example, among women, there is an upsurge. One wonders where all this is going. The people in charge have turned to enriching themselves from the HIV/Aids funds instead of fighting the scourge.

The report was released at a conference by Alliance of African Mayors Initiative for Community Action on Aids to draw new strategies to fight HIV/Aids. Hopefully this conference will come out with meaningful measures of combating the pandemic and is not just another workshop of sloganeering and harping and yapping about HIV when the virus continues