KAMPALA
(Reuters) - Ugandan authorities have launched a mass circumcision drive with the
hope it will reduce HIV/AIDS rates in the east African country.News (Updated
August 17, 2008)
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Tue Aug 12, 2008 8:35 AM BST
By Belinda Goldsmith
BEIJING (Reuters) - The Sydney Olympics ran out. Athens doubled the number. So organisers of the Beijing Games are hoping 100,000 condoms will satisfy the needs of Olympic athletes.
While sex is not an Olympic sport it is expected to be an activity in the Beijing village housing 10,500 athletes, all of whom are in great shape and with plenty of free time on their hands once knocked out of the Games.
Athletes have received free condoms at every Olympics since Barcelona in 1992 to help raise awareness of AIDS, and Beijing is no exception.
"There are many young, strong, single people in the athletes' village and, like everywhere, some will fall in love or other things so we need to make condoms available," Ole Hansen, spokesman for UNAIDS China, told Reuters.
"A lot of these young people are not married or in relationships so we want to make sure they have the information and tools to protect themselves if they have sexual encounters."
The UNAIDS, the Beijing organising committee BOCOG and International Olympics Committee are providing 100,000 condoms as part of a campaign on HIV prevention and anti-discrimination.
At the Sydney Games in 2000 athletes quickly exhausted a supply of 70,000 and another 20,000 had to be brought in.
The Foundation for AIDS Research, amfAR, said 100,000 were distributed at the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002 after a plan to distribute 250,000 condoms met protests by religious groups and was scaled back.
At Athens in 2004 about 130,000 condoms were distributed.
Hansen said the number available at Beijing was based on previous Games' experience and in keeping with previous Olympics would be available at medical centres at athletes' centres in Beijing, Qingdao and Hong Kong rather than put in rooms.
"We have people here from all religions and cultural backgrounds, some of whom may feel uncomfortable or offended with condoms in their room," he said.
To be discreet, two condoms are tucked inside every a brochure about HIV that are available at medical centres.
"No one can see that you are carrying condoms to save any embarrassment," said Hansen.
"People are encouraged to take the leaflets and to take as many as they like. They can use them or take them home for friends and spread the knowledge and awareness."
Chinese condom makers have jumped on the Olympics bandwagon.
One manufacturer, Elasun, has come up with a set of cheeky advertisements featuring a stickman swimming over a rippled condom that looks like a wave, riding two condom rings like a bicycle, and using a condom as a basketball hoop.
Condoms depicting the five Olympics mascots are also for sale on various online sites although nowhere to be seen in official merchandise stories.
11 Aug 2008 14:40:01 GMT
Source: IRIN
Reuters and AlertNet are
not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet
sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.
"As prices continue to
rise, people will start to buy cheaper, less nutritious food and may begin to
skip meals – in
"For people living
with HIV, who require more nutrition than healthy people, this will have
terrible consequences."
Rising oil prices, the
impact of climate change and the loss of agricultural land to biofuel production
have all contributed to the current crisis affecting people in the developing
world, most of whom rely on agriculture for their livelihood.
"The effects of
climate change have made food production less secure, droughts longer, and when
the rains come they are heavier and damage crops," Whiteside explained.
He noted that HIV-positive
people on antiretroviral (ARV) medication, who skipped doses because they did
not have food to take with their medication, risked developing drug resistance,
which could lead to treatment failure.
A likely increase in
mobility as people leave their homes to search for food and an income also had
the potential to disrupt treatment, said Martin Bloem, head of HIV/AIDS and
nutrition at the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). Increased mobility
has been associated with increased HIV risk, as men and women leave their
marital home for long periods.
Food shortages may also
lead to women and girls resorting to transactional sex, another factor that
increases the risk of HIV infection.
A way out of poverty
Robin Jackson, a UNAIDS
special advisor on food and nutrition, said providing daily food packages
containing corn soy blend, maize-meal, beans and sugar was relatively
inexpensive: about US$0.70 for an adult and $0.31 for a child.
But a combination of high
food prices and funding shortfalls meant the WFP had been forced to reduce the
number of people it was supporting around the world at a time when the need was
increasing. "In the past, only the poorest 10 percent of the population has
generally needed assistance, but that figure is rising along with food
prices," Bloem said.
Several speakers noted that
donors had not done enough to incorporate food support into their HIV
programmes. "Putting people on treatment without ensuring that they have
enough to eat is like sending your kids to school without any books," said
Besides food aid, speakers
also called for more programmes to provide livelihood support for agricultural
production in the form of direct cash transfers or micro-financing.
"In some cases, such
as school feeding and feeding people on ARVs, provision of food packages is the
ideal solution," Whiteside said. "But where local markets are able to
provide a nutritious diet, cash transfers may be the best way forward."
Supporting families engaged
in agriculture has the dual benefit of increasing food production and raising
nutrition and income levels.
A cash transfer scheme for
poor families in
15 Aug 2008 16:41:53 GMT
Source: IRIN
JOHANNESBURG, 15 August 2008 - More
international aid has been dedicated to fighting HIV/AIDS than any other
disease, but what impact have all those donor dollars had in countries where
HIV/AIDS funding often exceeds total domestic health budgets?
The three largest HIV/AIDS
donors - the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, the
But a new report by the
Washington-based Centre for Global Development, "Seizing the opportunity on
AIDS and health systems", launched at the International AIDS Conference in
"The big HIV donors
are creating AIDS-specific systems that compete for health workers and
administrative talent, share the same inadequate infrastructure, and further
complicate already complex flows of information," said Nandini Oomman, lead
author of the report.
Noting that "The
future of the global HIV/AIDS response cannot be considered independently from
that of national health systems," the study examined interactions between
the three donors and health systems in three countries where they work:
Focusing on three
components of those health systems - health information systems, supply chains
for essential drugs, and human resources - the researchers found that donors had
developed AIDS-specific processes, often creating a drain on resources essential
to the country's broader health system.
In the area of health
information systems, for example, all three donors have their own reporting
requirements, which burden already overstretched health facility staff with
multiple record-keeping duties. "This extra effort takes away time from
helping AIDS patients or providing other health services," Oomman pointed
out.
With the goal of
distributing antiretroviral drugs more efficiently, donors have also supported
the development of procedures that are separate from those for other essential
medicines.
The report warns that
"As antiretrovirals come to be offered at more and more facilities,
maintaining the separate systems will become increasingly complex," and
recommends integrating the two systems.
All three countries covered
in the report are experiencing severe shortages of qualified health workers, but
instead of training additional workers, the three donors have funded specific
training in HIV/AIDS for existing staff. In some cases, they have rewarded staff
for the extra work administering their programmes with salary top-ups.
"Such top-ups ...
focus the attention of clinical staff on HIV/AIDS - in some cases reducing the
time they give to other health services," the report's authors argued.
PEPFAR has also funded the
hiring of large numbers of non-governmental organisation (NGO) health workers,
who often earn significantly more than their counterparts working for the state.
A clerk working for a PEPFAR-funded programme in
Not surprisingly, donor
funding for better paying jobs with NGOs has sometimes pulled desperately needed
staff away from the state sector.
The report concludes that donors should shift their response from an initial emergency mode, in which they circumvented weak areas of national health systems to set up systems that could achieve quicker results.
Wed Aug 13, 2008 12:03 PM BST
By Frank Nyakairu
KAMPALA
(Reuters) - Ugandan authorities have launched a mass circumcision drive with the
hope it will reduce HIV/AIDS rates in the east African country.
Some studies indicate circumcision could be 70 percent effective in protecting men against infection by the disease during heterosexual intercourse, when used in conjunction with condoms and other safe-sex practices.
Government officials in Kampala have decided to take advantage of a month-long traditional "circumcision season" practiced by some tribes to drive the message home.
"Socially, it is uniting, and now it has also been proven medically, that is gratifying and it is part and parcel of now the strategy for fighting AIDS," Kibale Wambi, chairman of Sironko district in eastern Uganda, told Reuters.
The government plans to circumcise more than 3,000 local youths between the ages of 12 and 18. HIV activists say there needs to be more money and efforts like this on a global scale.
But some critics of circumcision in Uganda say it is brutal and dangerous. In traditional settings like Sironko, circumcisers have used the same knife for each young man.
This time, the government has introduced a strict one knife per operation ruling to ensure no infections are passed on.
"If a knife is to be re-used on another person, it first has to be sterilised," Wambi said, wearing a traditional hat covered with cowrie shells.
"We have also discouraged the traditional practice of forcing the circumcised males into sexual intercourse to prove their manhood after the wound heals, to avoid the spread of sexually transmitted diseases."
Some experts fear that some of the newly circumcised men may believe they are immune following the procedure -- translating into even more risky sexual behaviour.
"All I know is that when I am circumcised, it will not be as easy for me to get infected with HIV/AIDS," said one young man, Kizeja Michael, as he lined up for the operation.
"People who are circumcised are not able to get AIDS," said his friend, Peter Kibatsi.
Uganda has been widely praised for an education campaign about condoms that is credited with cutting HIV prevalence rates from 30 percent two decades ago to about 6 percent today.
(Editing by Daniel Wallis and Mary Gabriel)
Fri Aug 15, 8:20 PM ET
Two intensive-care patients contracted HIV after receiving blood transfusions at public hospitals in the Argentine province of Cordoba, a newspaper reported Friday.
An unidentified donor gave blood at a Cordoba city hospital in December, testing negative for HIV, Health Minister Oscar Gonzalez was quoted by Cordoba's La Voz del Interior newspaper as saying.
When the donor returned in May to give blood again, tests came back positive for the virus — but the blood had already been distributed, the newspaper said, citing Gonzalez.
Officials alerted local hospitals, and two patients were this week found to have been infected after receiving blood transfusions from the donor, who likely contracted HIV shortly before he or she gave blood in December, Gonzalez said, according to the newspaper.
The newspaper did not identify the donor, the hospital or the infected patients, in line with a national law that that does not allow such information to be disclosed publicly.
A so-called "window period" of 16 to 22 days can pass between exposure to HIV and the time antibodies can be detected in a standard blood test. During that time, a person can be contagious.
As in the U.S., blood donors in Argentina are given an extensive questionnaire to limit high-risk donors, who officially include gay men who've had sex in the past five years, people who've had sex for money or drugs in the past five years, or used intravenous drugs recreationally during that time.
About 120,000 people are infected with HIV in Argentina, Latin America's fourth-most populous nation, which also has the fourth-highest number of cases in the region, according to the U.N.
By BARBARA BORST, Special to The Associated PressSun Aug 17, 4:47 AM ET
Loyce
Mbewa-Ong'udi was late. Family and friends milled around her parents' house
in the green hills overlooking Lake Victoria, waiting for the daughter from
America to return home.
At last the taxi bounced over the ruts and made a sharp turn into the compound of small brick and stucco houses. Loyce sprang out to a shower of greetings in the Luo language, hugs, helping hands for 12 enormous suitcases crammed with anti-AIDS medicines, asthma inhalers, storybooks, pencils and sharpeners, recycled eyeglasses.
The supplies were for the Rabuor Village Project, which Loyce runs. In the crowd, she sought the woman who started it all: her mother, Rosemell Ong'udi.
This is the story of a village, spurred by two extraordinary women, rising from the depths of the AIDS epidemic to build a future for itself. In 10 years, with hardly any international aid, this poor farming community has founded a nursery school and feeding program, a pharmacy, a youth group and income-generating projects. The work touches more than 10,000 people in 10 villages and keeps growing.
But it's not just a list of projects; it's a change of heart. Rabuor's work embodies what experts consider the most effective approach to development: "community-owned" programs in which residents, not just donors, set the priorities, and change comes from the bottom up.
District Commissioner Godfrey Kigochi, senior Kenya government official for Kisumu West, says he wishes he had a project like this in every village. Organizations that give money or lend expertise to the Rabuor project — Slum Doctors, Lift Kids, Pangea, Architects Without Borders — say the group is unique for its pragmatism and deep community roots. Rev. Charles Ong'injo, who blessed the work from the start, is helping other congregations launch similar projects.
Kenya's AIDS rate has fallen since the 1990s, and far more people today are willing to go for testing and treatment. Still, about 14 percent of the district's 160,000 people are infected, double the national rate.
The Rabuor project is about a lot more than AIDS prevention: It's about people learning that they can better their own lives. Loyce, 52, bounds into a meeting and revs up the team, with the energy of the field hockey and track competitor she used to be.
Rosemell, 69, tall and sturdy, brings a quiet wisdom instead. She speaks in a girlish voice, and her laugh rumbles soft and low.
She began back in the 1990s, when AIDS was ripping the heart out of almost every family here. Yet people barely whispered about it because prostitutes and truckers were the early conduits of the disease.
Rosemell didn't talk about AIDS either, but she talked about the orphans it left behind. She recalls that the children were "very bad in their bodies" because they didn't have enough food.
She grew up without a father, helped raise her siblings, sometimes went without food herself. In 1998 she began giving the kids food from her own home. Then she turned to a women's group she had founded to see "what we can do for these children, now we are their mothers and fathers."
Worried about the orphans, Rosemell cut short a visit in 2001 to Loyce in Seattle. On her return, she asked Ong'injo if the women could use a room at the Rabuor church. She asked her husband, Wesley, a retired school headmaster, for money to hire a teacher. The women launched a nursery school.
When Loyce visited her childhood home months later, she saw how much had changed.
"I had a first-class community and village to bring me up. Everything a child could dream of, I had it," she says. "People rarely died. The first one I knew, I was 18."
But in Rabuor so many were dying that villagers spent much of their time and resources on funerals. Loyce, who once worked for the World Bank and the Gates Foundation, looked for a way to help.
She sent her salary. She asked people in her Seattle church to contribute. Then she and supporters founded Rabuor Village Project in 2003 as a nonprofit under U.S. law. The money trickling in helped buy land, build classrooms and hire teachers.
AIDS hit the Ong'udi family directly. Rosemell and Wesley — parents of 10, grandparents of 19 — buried two of their children, in 2004 and 2007, AIDS victims who each left behind a healthy child. Another of their children is HIV-positive but taking AIDS drugs.
But people were not ready to discuss AIDS; their focus was on feeding their families.
The first step was to increase crops, starting with corn. Next came projects to earn income, keep children in school and train adults in agriculture, nutrition, vocational skills. Conditions still remain basic: no running water, no electrical service, no cars, but a few cell phones.
Loyce, who calls her mother the Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. of Rabuor, credits Rosemell's political savvy for finding patrons. Ong'injo says the church's backing shields the work from corrupt politicians. Rosemell's son Kennedy helps navigate bureaucracy and politics as assistant chief.
Rosemell is stepping back, because she doesn't want the work to be seen just as "Ong'udi's thing." The new "chair lady" of the 100-member Karateng Rabuor Women's Group is Yuanita Ong'udi (not a relative). Projects include sunflowers for cooking oil, goats whose milk feeds the children, a donated truck they rent out and, always, help for the poorest.
The nursery school serves two hot meals and a hearty snack every day to 160 students. The Rabuor project pays 25 salaries, including four teachers, four cooks, a nurse and two pharmacists — people who volunteered before there was money for salaries. Community health workers survey 10 villages.
The youth group was born out of a meeting between Loyce and 150 angry youths in 2005, who felt the Rabuor project wasn't helping them. The group now runs a beekeeping project, raises chickens and makes bricks. In a cultural breakthrough, young men and women teach school and adult groups about HIV prevention, AIDS testing and treatment, including condom use, abstinence, responsible sexuality and reduced mother-to-child transmission.
Dawnson Owuor, project manager, says the projects interconnect. For example, the youths rent land from the women's group for their brickwork; when the women's group builds a classroom, it buys bricks from the youths. The projects also help many of the 60 families who fled here during the violence after Kenya's disputed presidential elections in December.
In Seattle, Loyce is the only person the project pays; the team relies on volunteers, including Carol Kinney, a nutritionist who conducted a feeding survey in Rabuor. Treasurer David Anstine, another volunteer, says money sent to Kenya rose from about $39,000 in 2005 to $165,000 in 2007.
Loyce is driven and admits to driving others. Early on, she chided people for wallowing in misery, as if they were saying, "I love the face of poverty. Darling poverty, live with me forever."
But Loyce doesn't own land or live here, and she recognizes the project can only succeed if villagers are involved. Kigochi, the district commissioner, says too many anti-AIDS groups offer training in hotels, at high cost; the Rabuor group works in the villages and "everyone appreciates it."
Loyce's work comes on top of full-time studies to complete a master's degree in public administration, and she's raising a daughter alone. She says she's energized by "something in the children's faces." Collins Otieno is inspired by U.S. presidential contender Barack Obama, whose father came from this region. And Brenda Amoke, an orphan, greets her with news of high school success: "Mommy, I'm No. 1."
In May, Rabuor registered an organization called Village by Village to link existing groups and expand into other communities. In June, Loyce launched a project, with Rotary Clubs, to pump drinking water to the village and for a vocational training center to teach tailoring, metalwork and computer skills.
This is not utopia. People work together, but they often disagree, sometimes sharply and publicly. For example, Owuor is excited about the expansion and about involving more men. But Kennedy Ong'udi, Rosemell's son, fears the changes will distract from caring for orphans and widows, empowering women and girls. And Rosemell is concerned that too big a role for men may turn the projects toward personal gain. As she puts it, "Men have many pockets."
The competing views are a sign of subsistence farmers becoming active citizens, of women speaking up. They are part of why people here believe their work will last, while many development projects collapse once the donors leave.
Loyce plans to find leaders like her mother in other communities and show them what a poor village can do. Her first day back in Rabuor, Loyce told a youth meeting she was proud to see so many girls and high school graduates.
She told them to plan what they want to do, then tell her how the Rabuor project can help.
Then she left so that they could be the ones to build their dreams.
14 Aug 2008 07:38:10 GMT
Source: IRIN
ABUJA, 14 August 2008 - There is no
explicit gay scene in Nigeria, but in the Ibiza bar in the capital, Abuja, the
action on the packed dance floor seems a little more exclusively guy-on-guy, a
little bit raunchier than may be considered "normal".
According to Oliver Okem*,
a smart and trendily bespectacled AIDS activist, when the mood and the music is
right, he and his friends can strut their stuff at Ibiza, Excelsior, or a couple
of other gay-tolerant clubs in Abuja. Sometimes, though, it becomes advisable to
"straighten up; rough-looking guys can stare at you, wondering what's up,
and maybe whispering among themselves".
Being gay in
In a country - especially
in the south - where marriage and children are seen as sacred, there is the
added pressure from parents who expect their offspring to settle down and
deliver grandchildren. Being gay means becoming invisible and, as a result of
that secrecy, much more vulnerable to HIV/AIDS.
A behavioural surveillance
survey by the ministry of health in 2007 found that, after sex workers, men who
have sex with men (MSM) were the group most at-risk of HIV infection, with a
prevalence rate of 13.4 percent – three times the national average of 4.4
percent. There was considerable variation in three cities surveyed, but in the
commercial capital,
The circumstances of MSM
vulnerability are not unique to
"A lot of stigma is
associated with the moral aspect [of homosexuality]. It drives people into the
closet – they don't want to come out, which means they can't access [AIDS]
services," said one senior HIV researcher, who asked not to be named as he
did not have clearance to talk to the media.
Okem said it was a little
more complicated. "The vast majority of MSM believe you cannot contract
STIs [sexually transmitted infections] from anal sex. In
The internet, with social
networking websites like Facebook, and the more discreet clubs provide enough
opportunities to hook up. "Very few relationships are formed, most of it is
about the sex or the benefits," said Okem.
"The majority of
'passive' [recipient] gay men have accepted their sexuality ... some 'actives'
may have done it once or twice and liked it – but wouldn't agree they are gay.
There is a financial exchange then, but more usually it is actives that take
money for sex."
Getting organised
Gays and lesbians are
beginning to organise: at least 10 groups have been formed in
Unlike Okem, who has not
told his parents or ruled out getting married, Orazulike is open about his
sexuality and feels attitudes are beginning to change. "People are coming
to the realisation that there are gays in
In the Muslim north there
has historically been a cultural acceptance of "Dan Daudu" – men who
live as women – despite the contradiction to traditional Islamic teaching. But
even in the south, with its avowedly macho outlook on life, Orazulike said he
had never been confronted with anti-gay aggression. That could be a testament
both to his discretion, and to the innocent incredulity with which many
Nigerians regard homosexuality.
"We don't intend to
rub people's faces in it, otherwise they are forced to react; just live your
life," Orazulike explained. That approach is likely to guide
"There will be no
specific intervention response that targets this group," said the
researcher, who works for a major funding agency. "It will be a package to
address the most at-risk groups, and we'll reach them that way, but not as a
population cohort themselves."
* Not his real name
13 Aug 2008 17:43:12 GMT
Source: IRIN
Reuters and AlertNet are
not responsible for the content of this article or for any external internet
sites. The views expressed are the author's alone.
ELEME, 13 August 2008 - Petrol
tankers parked nose-to-tail line the five-kilometre stretch of road from the
southern Nigerian town of Eleme to its refinery, waiting to fuel up and begin
their long journey home.
If the trip runs smoothly,
a tanker leaving the big cities of the north at dawn should arrive at Eleme, in
the troubled oil-rich delta region, by early evening. The following day the fuel
company's representative fights to get a "ticket" for the driver,
authorising the consignment. With the allotted load on board, the gear-grinding
exhaust-belching trucks nudge their way out of the depot and into the traffic.
But because things do not
usually go to plan, there is a thriving roadside service industry taking care of
stalled truckers, refinery workers, fuel dealers and anybody else looking for
accommodation, banks, butchers, bars, mechanics, places of worship, restaurants,
laundry services, film halls, cell phone kiosks – and sex.
More than 100 women from
all over
Eleme, on the southern rim
of
Rivers has an HIV
prevalence rate of 5.4 percent, above the national average of 4.4 percent, but
not the worst result in the country; that position is held by the state of Benue,
in central
Rivers, however, is at the
centre of delta militancy, in which armed young men have proved themselves
willing and able to take on the armed forces of the federal government to press
their demands for a fairer sharing of
AIDS and insecurity
Dr C. Okeh, head of the
State Action Committee on HIV/AIDS in Rivers, worries that the unrest will have
an impact on the fight against the virus. At the very least, "a crisis
situation means that you don't have time to listen to [AIDS] messages – you're
thinking of your immediate survival," he told IRIN/PlusNews.
Queen Henry is the peer
educator for the sex workers in Eleme, part of a community-based organisation
supported by the Society for Family Health,
Soldiers based at the
nearby river jetty, where cargo ships take on fuel pumped from the refinery
through a bundle of pipes, each the width of a man's waist, have decreed an
unofficial 9 p.m. curfew on the sex trade. Enforcing it has meant regular raids
on the shacks, kicking out customers and beating women not inside their rooms.
But the AIDS message is
sinking in, condoms are cheap and available, and the sex workers are organised.
Henry has no doubt that all the women she reaches know in theory the importance
of protection. "But the problem is you're not in the room with the girls
when they are alone with a customer," she explained. "If eager for
money, you do it [without a condom]; if you want to protect your life, you
don't," was her matter-of-fact assessment.
That triggered a
mini-debate among the women gathered outside her small kiosk, where she sells
tonics and douches. "Two thousand naira [roughly US$17, what some women
charge for sex without a condom] cannot cure the sickness inside my body [as a
result of HIV]. I have seen money [had a lot of it]; I'm too young to die. It's
not because of [greed that] I'll go and mess up my life," said Patience
Orkah, wearing black hot-pants and a lot of make-up.
All the women agreed,
except Charity Ekiti. "All I know is I [get the] money, I f***," she
chipped in. "If I [don't die as a result of AIDS], I still go die. I only
know God [won't] let that happen." Loud and outrageous, it was hard to tell
if she was serious. But what she made clear was that she did not bother using
condoms with her boyfriend: "It's not sweet like that."
Why condoms are still an
issue is because of men like Umoru, 36, who has a wife in the north but works
from Eleme as a tanker driver hauling fuel to the southern cities. He visits his
wife every three months or so, and in the interim – "just two or three
times" - calls on sex workers and offers double the normal rate not to use
a rubber. "They tell me [to wear one] but I no fit do am [I can't do it]
with condom."
He said some of the women
would refuse bareback sex, "even if you give them one million naira".
But he knows some who are less fastidious, and they are his regular partners.
"I fear [but everything that happens] is through God" was how he
rationalised the risk.
Chinenye Imoh sits at a
table under an umbrella all day, handing out information pamphlets to truckers
for the Arewa Society Against HIV/AIDS, a community-based organisation. She has
heard all the excuses before, especially by drivers from the more conservative
Muslim north, where discussion about sex is less open, literacy is low, and
girls often quit school and marry early.
"Some say people [in
the past also became] emaciated and died. Others say, 'no sickness wey no get
medicine' [every ailment has a cure] ... but we're trying," was her upbeat
message.
Wed, Aug 13 02:25 PM
NEW DELHI (Reuters) - The Kerala government has reserved a job for a HIV-positive candidate, a step that has won praise for its sensitivity towards patients afflicted with the killer virus, The Times of India said on Wednesday.
The Kerala State AIDS Control Society (KSACS) said they had issued advertisements for the post of coordinator -- to be filled by an HIV-positive candidate.
"It will also help us send our message in a better way as the channel of communication will be better," the societys project director Usha Titus told the newspaper.
Voluntary organisations in India working in the field of AIDS prevention have welcomed the initiative in a country which accounts for roughly half the estimated HIV-infected population in Asia with 2.47 million cases.