The Director-General, National Agency for the Control of Aids, NACA, Prof. John Idoko, said yesterday, that over 25 million people have died of HIV/AIDS since it was reported in 1981, noting that more than 33 million people were still living with HIV virus at present.
He also declared that 7,000 individuals were infected daily with the HIV virus in the world, more than twice as many as the number of people who start on anti-retroviral therapy each day.
Idoko stated this at the opening of a two-day zonal consultations on Ownership for Sustainable HIV Response, held in Abuja.
He said: "We still have very significant gaps. Every year, we still have 281,000 new infections. Of the three million people infected in the country, 1.5 million require to be on life-saving anti-retroviral drugs. Only 400,000 are receiving these."
He disclosed that Nigeria had the largest burden of transmission of HIV mother-to-child in the world, stressing that 30 per cent of the about 70,000 children born every year with HIV hardly lived to see their third birthday without treatment.
He noted that for Nigeria to fact-track the national response on HIV/AIDS, states and local governments must spearhead scale-up programmes being executed within their domains.
He said: "Structured reviews of national, state and local governments' plans must be implemented to monitor progress toward adopting long term strategies, plans and budgets.
"An exceptional response will continue to be needed in a heavily burdened country likes ours. Political leadership and accountability are sorely needed along with bold efforts to address the social drivers of HIV transmission."
In his remarks the Minister of State for Health, Dr. Mohammed Ali-Pate, noted that the Federal Government had risen to the task of controlling the spread of HIV, adding that his ministry was working towards reducing the 60 per cent gap in treatment.
Pate, who was represented by a director in the Health Ministry, Dr. Evelyn Ngige, further assured that the Federal Government was building up capacity to sustain as well as improve on the national response to HIV/AIDS.
He said: "We have an intervention that works and we are also working on making our intervention one that will bring up significant change in the control of AIDS."
Sent from my BlackBerry wireless device from MTN
Advertise on NigerianEye.com to reach thousands of our daily users
No comments
Post a Comment
Kindly drop a comment below.
(Comments are moderated. Clean comments will be approved immediately)
Advert Enquires - Reach out to us at NigerianEye@gmail.com