Photo: Wendy Stone/IRIN

HIV testing has been expanding

ADDIS ABABA, – Successful HIV testing campaigns in Ethiopia are showing a ten-fold jump in the number of people testing each year since 2005.

“Currently, 36 percent of women and 38 percent of men have ever been tested and received their test results,” the latest Demographic and Health Survey noted. ”Twenty percent of women and 21 percent of men have been tested for HIV and received their results in the 12 months before the [latest] survey,” published in March 2012.

“HIV testing has increased ten-fold since the 2005 EDHS [Ethiopia Demographic and Health Survey], when just 2 percent of women and men had been tested and received their results in the 12 months before the survey.”

First launched in 1999, HIV counselling and testing has been expanding – more than 2,300 sites now provide counselling and testing services across the country. Ethiopia uses both client- and provider-initiated testing, as well as community outreach testing and facility-based testing.

Data from the recent EDHS also indicated that out of 6,000 cohabiting couples who tested for HIV, 98.3 percent were HIV-negative, 0.6 percent were both HIV-positive, and 1.1 percent of couples were HIV discordant.

“The good thing these days is almost everybody has heard of condoms and most of them know how to use them properly. The problem is, a few months or years later young couples stop using condoms, relying on the time they know each other, without taking an HIV test,” said Aberash Yalew, a counsellor at Arada subcity in the capital, Addis Ababa.

According to experts, couples counselling and testing needs a boost. “Most only come for a test when they plan to travel abroad and testing is put as a condition. Hardly any couples come when they decide to stop using condoms.”

Aberash noted that cultural norms often prevented parents from discussing sex with their children, which meant many young people were ill-informed when they started having sex. “The belief that their kids would not have sex before they get married is still so many parents’ – even if they may suspect otherwise, they choose to ignore the prevailing fact,” she said.

“We need to do more, especially to increase comprehensive knowledge of people about HIV/AIDS, and in urban areas we need to work more to change the behaviour of people with multiple sex partners who are engaged in unsafe sex,” said State Minister of Health Dr Keseteberhan Admasu. “We are doing that and we want to do more, including making voluntary counselling and testing more accessible.”

Donors, too, say they are placing more emphasis on counselling and testing. “The Unites States Government’s support to HIV counselling and testing has expanded from 564,407 in 2006 to 5.5 million in 2011,” said Diane Brandt, spokesperson for the US Embassy in Addis Ababa.

Brandt says major progress in the expansion and uptake of counselling and testing was recorded after the Millennium AIDS Campaign, which ran from November 2006 to September 2008. “The campaign created huge demand – from a half million testing in a year to millions,” she noted.

The EDHS found that the national average HIV prevalence has remained low at 1.5 percent, but in urban areas the rate is 5.2 percent, which is significantly higher than the 0.8 percent generally found in rural areas.

kt/kr/he source www.irinnews.org

Photo: Steve Sandford/IRIN

Thousands of Burmese refugees came out to greet her

MAE LA,  – Spirits were high among the select group of Burmese refugees waiting in the stifling midday heat to catch a brief glimpse of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, affectionately known simply as “The Lady”, during her historic visit to Thailand’s largest refugee camp on the Thai-Burmese border.

Security was tight at the Mae La camp as more than a thousand refugees were allowed into a barricaded area on 2 June, where they lined up along a dirt road leading to the camp clinic to welcome the column of vehicles surrounded by armed militia escorting Aung San Suu Kyi, who took her seat in the Burmese parliament in May after being kept under house arrest for 15 of the past 21 years.

“I have never seen her before so that is why I am here to see her,” said Ma Tway Yee, 47, who fled her home last year when fighting broke out between government forces and the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army.

“I think if there is peace in Burma I would really like to go back to my village, but not now, because there are military base camps in my village,” the mother of 10 told IRIN.

Fellow camp inhabitant Ah Zeet agreed. “It’s about more than just security. There are also the political issues – as long as they have not been resolved, we cannot safely go back. There has to be guarantees of our safety if we are to return.”

Myanmar’s first nominally civilian government in decades has instituted reforms including the release of hundreds of political prisoners, allowing the formation of labour unions, lifting media restrictions, and the entrance of the pro-democracy National League for Democracy (NLD) into Myanmar’s government.

NLD leader Aung San Suu Kyi was not allowed to use a loud-speaker to address the refugees. But, standing on a chair to make herself visible, she was allowed to speak briefly to the crowd of well-wishers and supporters at the clinic.

“Someday you will be able to go home – I will try for that. People in the front row have to tell the other people that,” she shouted to make herself heard above the crowd. “I will do what I can to help to fill in the health and necessary needs in the refugee camp.” Much of her speech was lost in the shouting and cheers from the people gathered around her inside the fenced hospital yard.

Many of the ethnic leaders were disappointed that meetings with Aung San Suu Kyi, who was surrounded by Thai security personnel, did not take place, and several key stops in the Thai border town of Mae Sot were skipped, including the Mae Tao Clinic, which serves the Burmese refugee population, the vast majority of whom are ethnic Karen.

Photo: Steve Sandford/IRIN

Security was particularly tight

Visitors from neighbouring camps hoped they would all benefit from the Nobel Peace Prize laureate’s visit. “I hope that Aung San Suu Kyi will be able to see the difficult conditions that the people in the refugee camps face here. Even the children that were born in here have no right to travel, so I hope that will give… [her] something to think about,” said Saw Mort, who was recording the visit for the Karen Student Network.

According to the Thai Burma Border Consortium (TBBC), an umbrella group of NGOs working along the border, there are more than 140,000 Burmese refugees, mostly ethnic Karen, living in 10 camps along the 1,800km Thai-Burmese border, including more than 53,000 unregistered people.

In eastern Myanmar, particularly in Karen state, healthcare and education standards are rated among the worst in Asia.

The sprawling camp of Mae La houses close to 50,000 people. Naw Bee, 47, was preparing dinner for her family of five children. “If I go back it would be good to have a job, and my children need an education. Right now, if I go back to the village I have no farm to work on.”

Like Naw Bee, most of the refugees in the camp were forced from their homes during attacks by Myanmar’s former ruling military junta.

The government has long had a contentious relationship with its ethnic minority groups, which account for about a third of the country’s more than 54 million inhabitants. Fighting broke out more than 60 years ago, after the country gained independence from Britain.

Despite ongoing peace talks between the government and most ethnic groups, fighting in northern Kachin State between Burmese government forces and the Kachin Independence Army continues, and tens of thousands remain displaced nearly a year after a 17-year-old ceasefire was broken.

ss/ds/he source www.irinnews.org

Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was recently sentenced to life in prison accused of not doing enough to stop the killings during the uprising which saw him removed from power.

His sons and others considered his close allies were freed by the court. This has caused new demonstrations to erupt.

People against Mubarak would like to see his sons sent to jail.

During the recent elections, his last Prime Minister managed to score votes and will be in the second round this month competing with the man who represents the Muslim brotherhood.

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