Mr. Joseph Kwami Degley, Ketu South Municipal Director, Ghana Health Service (GHS) has bemoaned the increase in new HIV infections in the Municipality in 2019.

He said during the year under review, the Directorate tested 15, 227 persons for HIV and out of that, 345 persons representing about 2.3 per cent tested positive, eroding the gains made at ending the epidemic by 2030.

The Director of Health Services who made this known at the 2019 annual performance review at Aflao said the situation was getting out of hand and needed stakeholders to come on board to reverse the trend.

“The fight against HIV and AIDS seems to be lost as a result of the following reasons. First, the population of female sex workers in the Municipality is on the increase. There’s also the population of men having sex with men reaching alarming proportions in the municipality.

“Abuse of drugs and related substances by our youth leading to degenerative behaviours is scary and needs to be checked by law enforcement agencies,” he added.

Mr Degley however was happy the Directorate met its target of avoiding preventable maternal deaths and hoped to continue to save the lives of mothers and babies across the Municipality

“Last year, our target for maternal mortality was zero. The slogan was zero tolerance for maternal death and it came to pass that we recorded zero.”

He congratulated the hardworking staff for their selfless dedication to duty saying, though there were “nerve wrecking challenges” during the year, they put up their best to provide quality services to clients.

The Director said the “year 2020 is not going to be any different” but “we need to rededicate ourselves to the task at hand and strive hard to work as a team to achieve our objective of providing the highest quality of health care to all Ghanaians.”

The one-day performance review meeting, which served as a forum to give feedback to stakeholders in health on the performance of the Directorate, its successes and challenges attracted health workers from other districts including those from District Number Four of Kodjoviakope in neighbouring Togo.