NACA Uncovers 3500 Male Sex Workers In Abuja
Category: Health & Physical Fitness
The National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) yesterday has said
it recently discovered and identified about 3500 male sex workers within
the Abuja city centre.
The agency added that it is worried by
these figures because over 60 per cent of these men are married,raising
the concern of spouse HIV transmission.
At its maiden lecture
yesterday to mark this year’s World AIDS day in Abuja with the theme-
Strategies for Ending AIDS in Nigeria by 2030, the Director General of
NACA, Professor John Idoko said the agency is now targeting hotspot
areas in its drive to end the HIV epidemic.
“Within the Federal
Capital Terrritory, we found that if we focus our resources in three
council areas of Gwagwalada, Bwari and Abuja Municipal, we would have
covered a greater population of persons with HIV within the area,”
Idoko said the agency is developing interventions to be able to reduce contact between infected and uninfected persons.
In
his lecture, Professor James Blanchard, director of Global Health at
the University of Manitoba, Canada said that even with modern
technologies, HIV prevention is a very complex thing because there are
social factors that need to be addressed like political commitment and
advocacy, laws and labour policies, community mobilisation and a host of
other things.
He said Nigeria is a very large and complex country
and reaching those who need to receive the treatment requires that the
country focus on the right environment and high risk areas.
“We
need to match our HIV interventions with the population of HIV
distribution. We need to get down to the micro level to know where we
put our resources. We have the sex workers, persons who inject drugs and
men who have sex with men,” he said.
He explained that the NACA
survey has identified eight priority states in Nigeria becaus HIV is not
evenly distributed adding that there are very large populations in
parts of FCT, Lagos, Nasarawa and Benue.
He said, “We found that
in Benue, 60 per cent of men who visited bars, restaurants and hotels
were seeking sexual partners while 12 per cent of the females were
seeking sexual partners and 9 percent of those who patronise these
places are female sex workers.
“We also noticed substantial risk
behaviour in rural areas. In Benue, 30 per cent of the unmarried men had
visited a worker and 18 per cent had visited a sex worker within the
last one month. But this was not the same across the state as some
places were high risk areas.”
Leadership
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