‘HIV prevalence rate in Zambia still high'

COMMENT - If Zambia wants to lower it's HIV rate, start measuring it accurately. Use demographically representative Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) instead of the Antenatal Clinic Surveys of pregnant women only (championed by UNAID$). And start using a Western Blot confirmation test to confirm positive ELISA screening tests. My guess is that this would reduce national HIV prevalence rates in Zambia to well under 3%.

‘HIV prevalence rate in Zambia still high'
By Masuzyo Chakwe
Tue 29 Nov. 2011, 12:30 CAT

ZAMBIA cannot start celebrating the reduction in the HIV prevalence rate until it reaches a zero infection rate, says the Network of Zambian People Living with HIV and AIDS.

Commenting on the 2011 UNAIDS World AIDS Day report released in Berlin last week which indicated that Zambia was among Sub-Saharan African countries whose HIV infection rate had dropped, NZP+ programmes manager Kulima Banda said the HIV prevalence rate in Zambia was still high.

"It is actually higher in the urban areas than in the rural areas, so we can't start celebrating until we reduce the incidence rate of HIV. So right now we still have a long way to go," she said.

Banda said the 82,000 new HIV infections the country records annually was very high.

However, she said the reduction could be attributed to the multi sectoral approach by different players and stakeholders in ensuring that prevention, treatment and support was available.

Banda said what needed to be done now was to get more people tested because the entry point for prevention was people knowing their status.

"But at the moment only 13 per cent of the population knows their status. So it means that we have a big number of people that are HIV positive but do not know their status. So for us to reduce infection rates, it means that more people need to get tested and when they know their status, then the level of transmitting HIV will be further reduced," she said.

She said there was also need to get more people to access prevention services and to get people treated early.

Banda said the more people were put on treatment early, the less likely it was for them to transmit HIV.

She said there was also need to get more women to access prevention of mother to child transmission.

And Banda said the country was seeing more messages on HIV going out to the public but what was needed was more targeted messages for specific places and people.

"We need targeted messages for young people, for people in rural areas because what we are seeing now is that we are seeing more messages on TV but not everyone has a television set across the country and not everybody can access ZNBC and other TV stations. So let us have a bit more targeted information for everybody," she said.

Banda said she was happy that more messages on the drivers of the HIV pandemic which were quite real were being seen as they were making people realise that they had different responsibilities for HIV prevention.

Banda also said there was need for more promotion of the female condom across the country because there was a notion that people do not want to use it. "But I think it should be promoted more as the male condom is promoted," said Banda.

The report which was released by UNAIDS executive director Michel Sidibe during an International Conference on HIV, titled "HIV Prevention without Barriers", revealed that in 2010, about 68 per cent of people living with HIV resided in sub-Saharan Africa, a region with only 12 per cent of the global population.

"In 22 sub-Saharan countries, research shows HIV incidence declined by more than 25 per cent between 2001 and 2009. This includes some of the world's largest epidemics in Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe. The annual HIV incidence in South Africa, though still high, dropped by a third between 2001 and 2009 from 2.4 per cent to 1.5 per cent," the report stated.

"Similarly the epidemics in Botswana, Namibia and Zambia appear to be declining. The epidemics in Lesotho, Mozambique and Swaziland seem to be leveling off, albeit at unacceptably high levels."