Aboabo No 2 (B/A), Aug. 15, GNA - The HIV situation in Dormaa Municipality has taken an upward surge as the 159 cases recorded in the first half of 2007 have shot up to 197 over the same period this year. Madam Florence Iddrisah, Dormaa Municipal Director of Health Services, said this at a one-day HIV counselling and health games for 1,300 youth at Aboabo No 2 near Dormaa Ahenkro.

The programme, under the theme "Counselling for Decision-Making", was jointly organised by Dormaa Traditional Healers and Birth Attendants Association, a Dormaa-based NGO and the Alliance for Reproductive Health.

Male and female football teams from four towns that participated competed for a trophy and were given talks on the various strains, signs and symptoms of fully-fledged AIDS, available anti-retroviral and the stigma associated with HIV affected persons. Madam Iddrisah said 15-49 year bracket remained the worst-hit and that the youth are still adamant to calls to adopt lifestyles that could steer them away from the pandemic.

She said the municipal health directorate had, in a bid to diversity methods to get the youth to embrace attitudinal change, launched a month-long counselling and testing exercise dubbed "Know your status" to offer counselling and testing to volunteers free of charge. The municipal director urged the youth to take advantage of the free facility to ascertain their status.

Madam Aba Oppong, co-ordinator of health programmes at the Centre for the Development of People, stressed the importance for the youth to abstain from sex till they got married.

Mr. Mahama Salaam, project co-ordinator of the association, said the NGO had peer educators in five schools and communities and had planned to expand its activities.

Madam Iddrisah said at the maiden meeting of the Municipal Health Committee at Dormaa Ahenkro that 25 new tuberculosis cases were detected between January and June this year, indicating an upward surge of the disease.

She said malaria remained top of the 10 worrisome diseases in the municipality.

"Malaria alone recorded 38,405 out a total of 99,058 out-patient cases during the period under review, which also saw 207 dog bites and 73 snake bites", Madam Iddrisah said.

She noted that the achievement of the fourth and fifth goals of the millennium development goals, which proposed a drastic reduction in maternal and child mortality, was being hampered by several avoidable factors.

"Families are not encouraging pregnant mothers to seek ante-natal care early enough and this result in undue delays that culminate in complications and probable deaths."

Madam Iddrisah said many families still stuck to traditional ways of child delivery and had remained adamant to the important role that orthodox medicine could play.

She said the government's proposed high rapid impact delivery programme would help to eliminate some of the problems as it would ensure identification of pregnant women under systematic surveillance.