Drug Users Account for Nine Percent of New HIV/AIDS - NACA. 20/9/11
Injective drug users in Nigeria (IDU) account for about 9% of the new HIV infection
By Ruby Leo
20 September 2011
Injective drug users in Nigeria (IDU) account for about 9% of the new HIV/AIDS infection cases being recorded across the country but yet this group has not been actively catered for in various treatment programmes, the National Agency for the Control of AIDS has revealed.
Dr Gregg Ashefo, the deputy director, Strategy Knowledge department in NACA who spoke to health insight on this recent development lamented that stigmatization is responsible for the evasive attitude of the injective drug users.
Ashefo said, " little is known about this group because they are a hard to reach population, due to the kind of discrimination, stigmatization and marginalization they suffer".
According to him very few project target this people , despite the fact that they contribute significantly to the new infection rate in the country.
His words, "the mode of transmission based on some analysis conducted last year show that this group of people contribute as high as 9% to the HIV rate in the country, so it is important that something be done about this group of persons".
"The prevalence rate among this set of persons is 5.6% with varying range in different cities, for example it is high in Kano, with about 10.1 % prevalence, while the median rate of the country as of 2008, the national average is about is 3.6%, the rate is quite high in this special group of people".
He complained that some stringent policies and laws has made it quite difficult for NACA to track and provide care and treatment to the group which he explained would be a challenge to the national AIDS policy.
He stressed the importance of liberalizing the way policies are planned and implemented saying, "It would be good to liberalize the way we do things especially for the high risk group, we can reach out to them, for example there is no need banning the sex workers.
"Instead we should have ways of bringing them on board like the IDU, sexual workers and MSM because if we don't, they would go underground and continue in their act, (incest) and this would not augur well for HIV/AIDS control".
He noted that if the strategy used for immunization which is the House to House method could be adopted and used in the NACA policy, it would go along way in controlling the transmission.
He said, "some countries actually adopted this, and are receiving very good results, like in Zimbabwe, they are doing what they call house base counseling and testing, it needs moving from house to house, although it is very costly but we can select randomly.
"We can strategically select high prevalent commodities, like Benue, cross river, if we identify the priority areas and introduce the house to house, we would be able to meet our target of testing about 80million Nigeria, or about 80% of the Nigeria's population will know they status by 2015, which is in our NSP.