Nigeria is slowing global efforts to curb AIDS
A new report by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) says that Nigeria has the second largest HIV epidemic globally, with an estimated 3.2 million people living with the disease, and particularly high HIV infection rates among key populations.
What is even more troubling is the fact that Africa’s biggest economy accounts for more than half (51 per cent) of the burden in Western and Central Africa. This means that almost two-thirds of all new HIV infections in West and Central Africa occurred in Nigeria in 2016.
There over 362 million people in West Africa and another 168.8million people in Central Africa or middle Africa. Of this population Nigeria has about 198million and yet accounts for two-thirds of every new cases.
Sani Aliyu, the director general of National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA), a government-funded agency to tackle the disease estimates that about 600 Nigerians are infected with HIV and about 400 Nigerians die from this infection daily.
The WHO also says that Nigeria contributes to the largest number of HIV-infected babies in the world. One in every four babies born with HIV in the world in 2016 was a Nigerian child.
It is alarming these statistics have been true for last 10 years with very little variation even though government agencies report request for resources and pledge commitment to combat the menace.
The number of persons on life saving medications has increased from about 100,000 to over a million and the number of hospitals providing HIV/AIDS treatment sites has increased more than 10-fold, yet the epidemic burden has remained the same.
Token efforts
The National Agency for the Control of AIDS (formerly National Action Committee on AIDS) was established in February 2000 to coordinate the various activities of HIV/AIDS in the country and mandated to provide an enabling policy environment and stable on-going facilitation of proactive multi sectoral planning, coordinated implementation, monitoring and evaluation of all HIV/AIDS prevention and impact mitigation activities in Nigeria.
NACA is beset with challenges including lack of accurate verifiable data, poor budgetary allocations and the general neglect of the health sector by successive governments. Lack of precise estimates militates against determining the epidemic burden but also the measurement of the impact of current interventions to improve planning in an era of budget cuts and uncertain donor resources.
The agency recently launched the National HIV/AIDS Indicator and Impact Survey (NAIIS) which is capable of reliably estimating the current status and spread of HIV, Hepatitis B and C in the 36 states of the federation and FCT.
NAIIS is expected to run for six months with 2,000 research enumerators collecting data from thousands of households across the country. The results, which are expected to be ready early 2019, will help the country determine the actual burden of HIV/AIDs and take ownership of management of the disease, which until now has largely been funded by donors.
The WHO says that since the beginning of the epidemic, more than 70 million people have been infected with the HIV virus and about 35 million people have died of HIV. Globally, 36.9 million [31.1–43.9 million] people were living with HIV at the end of 2017.
Globally the rate of infection is falling even though the United Nations Children Emergency Fund (UNICEF) said that while there has been substantial progress in the fight against AIDS in the last two decades, the failure to prevent so many new infections among children and teenagers is slowing this down.