Know facts of stigmatisation

Saturday, March 8, 2008 (The Mirror Pg 38)
By Rebecca Kwei
The Presidential Advisor on Reproductive Health and HIV & AIDS, Professor Fred T. Sai, has said it is important for social scientists to know the facts of stigmatisation and discrimination of people living with HIV and AIDS.
“That a disease which results from an accepted human behaviour is so stigmatised is strange to some of us who have observed behaviour and STIs in Ghana for a long time”, he said.
Prof. Sai was speaking at the opening ceremony of the 2nd National HIV & AIDS Research Conference (NHARCON) in Accra.
The three-day conference which had the theme, “Sustaining the Comprehensive National Response to HIV” brought together researchers, programme managers, policy makers and other stakeholders to discuss research findings on various aspects of the HIV and AIDS epidemic in the country.
Prof. Sai said research was critical to finding the causes of diseases, cure, prevention and how to apply these and that without research, the country would be unable to continue to developing scientific and evidence-based preventive methodologies and safe and user-friendly treatments.
“For true progress, basic science and clinical researches have to be combined with serious social science research for programme development”, he noted.
He said reasons for high feminisation of the disease, the vulnerability of youth and the interaction of the virus and treatment with the “internal nutritional and pathologic environments of our populations” were of great urgency to programmes in Ghana.
Other reasons Prof. Sai suggested for both social and basic research were traditional medicine and resource mobilisation and allocation.
On the issue of reporting scientific findings and the need for the media to be objective, he noted that it would be helpful for scientists to be more directly involved in passing knowledge on to the population, adding that “the health of the people cannot be improved without the full and well-informed involvement of the media on a continuous basis.”
The Director-General of the Ghana AIDS Commission, Prof. Sakyi Awuku Amoa, said the 2007 HIV Sentinel Survey Report indicated that the national prevalence rate declined from 2.22 per cent in 2006 to 1.9 per cent in 2007.
He said this was a significant indication that the epidemic was stabilising in Ghana and added that Ghana had adopted a multi-sectoral approach as the most effective strategy to deal with the epidemic.
“The National Strategic Framework 2006-2010 that underlies the approach recognises the epidemic as a socio-economic development challenge and, therefore, incorporates strategies for dealing with its complex dimensions,” he said.
On research, he said, it had also been identified as a key intervention in the National Strategic Framework and as a tool for designing an evidence-based national response.
“Whether Ghana will remain a generalised epidemic country indefinitely or achieve a lower prevalence by preventing large numbers of new infections in the future will largely depend on knowledge among the populace of factors that contribute to the spread of the epidemic,” he added.
For his part, the UN Resident Coordinator, Mr Dauda Toure, urged participants to use the conference as an opportunity to review collective national efforts and to set the agenda for the future by sharing scientific evidence, lessons learnt and best practices with a view to devising ways of sustaining a comprehensive national response.
The Chairperson for the National Population Council, Mrs Virginia Ofosu-Amaah, who chaired the ceremony, said the country should not rest on its laurels because the national HIV prevalence declined from 2.22 per cent in 2006 to 1.9 per cent in 2007 but rather, there was more to do in terms of prevention, care and support.
She said lessons learnt at the conference should be widely disseminated at all levels to improve the national response to HIV and AIDS.