Appropriate Treatment is Best Prevention Against HIV Transmission - Activist

Chioma Obinna
To root out new cases of HIV & AIDS infection, an expert has said that with proper regimen of treatment or appropriate treatment, no new case of HIV transmission will be recorded through sex, or a positive person coming down with AIDS.

Also, positive mothers who religiously keep to the treatment have been proven not to transmit the virus to their babies within a success rate of 98 per cent.

Executive Director of Positive Action for Treatment Access, PATA, Rolake Odetoyinbo, said studies have shown that people living with HIV with limited significant viral load have 96 per cent success rate of not coming down with AIDS and transmitting to others."

"When you treat people with HIV, you are also protecting others without the virus." she added.

Odetoyinbo said the good thing about appropriate treatment is that it reduces viral load of a positive person to an insignificant level, making it, almost impossible to transmit the virus to uninfected person through sex. In the same vein, the infected person will not come down with AIDS.

She spoke during Unilever's interactive session on World AIDS Day with the theme: "Getting to Zero"- Zero Discrimination, Zero New infections, Zero Deaths".

She said to ensure zero new infections in line with the theme, there is need for revolutionize HIV prevention, reduction of sexual transmission of HIV by half especially among young people, men who have sex with men and in sex workers, elimination of vertical transmission of HIV, reduction of AIDS related maternal mortality reduced and prevention of all new HIV infections among people who use drugs.

To prevent infection, Odetoyinbo recommended the prevention and management of sexually transmitted infections through work place awareness creation and provision of Post exposure Prophylaxis (PEP).

Other recommendations, she made include; decreasing the incidence of HIV due to unsafe blood transfusion by supporting Blood Safety efforts, HIV testing and counselling encouraged among pregnant women to eliminate infant transmission.

Quoting that a latest survey that 39 per cent of births in Nigeria were assisted by Skilled Birth Attendants, she called for more skilled professionals during pregnancy and childbirth.

On zero AIDS related death, she stressed the need to educate, train and retrain all people on HIV and AIDS as well as push for fund treatment in line with WHO's revised treatment guidelines which recommend that infants, if HIV- exposed should be tested by four to six weeks of age and those found positive should be started on antiretroviral therapy immediately upon diagnosis to reduce infant mortality rate.

"There should be support free and accessible drugs to treat opportunistic infections.

Odetoyinbo further called on Nigeria government to honour their commitment at Abuja Declaration of budgeting 15 per cent to health.

In his views, the Managing Director, Mr. Thabo Mabe who described the theme as a daunting challenge for all, stated that nations would not fold their arms and allow HIV&AIDS to destroy humanity. For this reason, he said Unilever sees the problem as surmountable.

Mabe said: Unilever is leading a campaign against HIV & AIDS. We are among the firsts to have work place policy in Nigeria. The Federal recognised this and made Unilever a founding member and grade A member of Nigerian Business Coalition Against AIDS (NIBUCAA).

"We have over the years trained interested employees as HIV& AIDS peer educators. The most recent of these enlightenment programmes is Moments like this. It was run on 10 radio stations across Nigeria using English, Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba languages.

This programme reached over HIV & AIDS over 20 million listeners across Nigeria. WE have also monitored other companies to form HIV&AIDS workplace policy"

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