Treating HIV victims as needy persons is wrong - Doctor

Dr. Armel Abou, the Medical Director of the St. Joseph Orthopedic Hospital has said the perception that People Living with HIV (PLWHIV) were needy people who must always be supported was erroneous and critical to stigma reduction.

He said if HIV should be seen as any other disease that afflicts people, then Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working for such people should be conscious of the fact that calling for support ranging from food to drugs would not help national response in fighting the stigma.

Dr. Abou said this at a day’s seminar organized by the US Embassy under the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS relief (PEPFAR) for CSOs and coalition of NGO’s working in the area of HIV and AIDS in Koforidua.

Dr. Abou, who presented the state of HIV three decades after the first case was recorded in Ghana, said despite the heavy investment by government and donor partners, response to the disease had not been as expected, and urged CSOs to stop creating the impression that it was the responsibility of someone to take care of HIV victims because they are the neediest people in the world.

He said there are other equally terminal diseases such as cancer, hypertension, diabetes and others; and people afflicted go about their normal work and buy their own medicines for survival, yet people with HIV want to create the impression that everything must be done for them adding that,“that is why we are not making a headway”.

For him, every disease required attention and treatment, and once an HIV infected person is put on treatment, he is supposed to be strong and go about his or her normal duties and, therefore, urged NGOs and CSOs working for People Living With HIV(PLWHIV) to stop creating the impression that government or the donor partners were responsible for them.

Dr. Abou said CSOs, instead of identifying the real challenges such as preventing resistance to ART drugs by following the protocols of treatment and the challenge of how to ensure that reproductive needs of infected persons were taken care of to prevent mother to child transmission, “are rather competing for funds”.

This, he said, had resulted in the society’s response being fragmented, limited in scope and incoherent, and the CSOs leading the national response being reduced just to program implementers who are being directed by donors instead of coming up with their own programs which are based on their experience on the field and more beneficial to the nation implementers who are being directed by donors instead of coming up with their own programs which are based on their experience on the field and more beneficial to the nation.

Ms. Jeanne Clarke, Information Officer at the US Embassy, said the PEPFAR was initiated by President George Bush in 2003 and instituted in Ghana in 2007, and had supported over 5 million people with lifesaving drugs.

She said the programme was not paying attention to tuberculosis which had been identified as an opportunistic disease that affected most of the PLWHIV.