Mozambique: Health minister calls on stakeholders to boost HIV response

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Mozambique: Health minister calls on stakeholders to boost HIV response

7:52 CAT | 13 Aug 2021

Photo: MISAU

Mozambican Minister of Health Armindo Tiago on Wednesday called on stakeholders in the health sector to strengthen preventive actions against HIV/AIDS so as to achieve progress towards universal access to prevention, care and treatment.

Addressing the opening session of the eighth National Meeting for the Control of Sexually Transmitted Infections (STI), Tiago said that to achieve the desired success, more people living with HIV must know their status.

Presently, only 74 per cent of the people living with HIV across the country are benefiting from free anti-retroviral treatment (ARVT) although 94 per cent of the public health care network offers anti-retroviral services. This means that about half a million HIV-positive Mozambicans are not receiving the life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs.

“The quality of the ARVT service and the care quality have been monitored systematically and there have been great efforts to improve such quality by the health care givers at the health units,” Tiago stressed.

The latest estimates are that in 2020 there were 98,000 new HIV infections. 38,000 deaths were HIV-related and 94,000 pregnant women tested positive for HIV. The rate of vertical transmission of the virus from mother to child was 13 per cent. The same estimates indicate that about 2.1 million people across the country are living with the virus.

“In recent years, we have noted a trend towards a reduction in new infections and in HIV mortality, which encourages us”, said Tiago. “We know that this is not happening by accident, but is the result of hard work, which must be consolidated in the coming period”.

He stressed that the priorities must remain prevention, counselling and testing, putting those eligible into contact with the ARVT services, and ensuring that they keep taking the treatment.

He pointed out the importance of interventions intended to identify people at high risk of contracting HIV as well as the offer of pre-exposure prophylaxis and the free distribution of condoms.

Among the constraints his Ministry faces in the fight against STIs, Tiago said, are terrorism in the northern province of Cabo Delgado, the armed violence of the self-styled “Renamo Military Junta” in parts of the central provinces of Manica and Sofala, natural disasters and the Covid-19 pandemic.

Source: AIM