THE Oyo State government, in support of ending AIDS by 2025, is developing a comprehensive action plan to sustain and scale up HIV, TB, gender, and human rights responses as part of its effort to contain the HIV situation and ensure treatment is available across its 33 local government areas.
The executive secretary, Oyo State Agency for the Control of AIDS (OYSACA), Dr. Lanre Abass, at a stakeholders meeting on sustaining and scaling up HIV and TB gender human rights, said that ending the AIDS epidemic by 2030 requires addressing stigma more systematically and at a larger scale than current efforts.
Dr Abass, who said that TB and HIV are co-infections and one predisposing to the other, declared that stigma and discrimination are barriers that still undermine HIV testing, linkage to care, treatment adherence, and viral load suppression in Nigeria.
According to him, “We need to do more in terms of testing, linkages to treatment, and treatment adherence for TB and HIV. Ability to identify people living with either HIV or TB is very important and the first step in bringing them to treatment.
“The estimated number of people living with HIV is 58,000. But we have less than 30,000 on treatment. That means we have about 28,000 people that are still living in our community that we have not been able to identify. So we need to scale up our game to identify these people and then bring them into the treatment net.
“On human rights status state response, we are seeing many cases. A man beating his wife on a regular basis, and women being raped or sexually assaulted, but people are not speaking up because of the stigma that is attached.
“Rape definitely has a lot to do with HIV transmission because the man and the woman raped may be exposed to HIV. Even the man beating his wife almost every other day may be one with multiple sexual partners and therefore easily come down with HIV.”
OYSACA’s Project Manager, Dr Olukayode Ogunkunle, said that human rights abuse of women who are living with HIV is rampant in the rural areas, and stakeholders should rally around to stem it and other gender-based violence that are associated with living with HIV.
“If the man knows his wife is positive, he will ask her to pack her bag and leave from her home. It might be just because a relative who is living with HIV sees the wife of his brother or relative come to assess the HIV drug,” he said.
The Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr Abiodun Aikomo, represented by Mrs Tomi Popoola, the senior state counsel for the Oyo State Sexual and Gender-Based Violence Response Team, knows or detects that someone who lives with HIV or TB automatically comes with gender-based violence in Nigeria.
He, therefore, called for more referrals of such persons for prosecution to serve as a deterrent for others in the community who still engage in all forms of stigmatisation and gender-based violence-related issues.
Oyo State Programme officer for the Resilient System for Sustainable Health Development/COVID-19 Response Mechanism (RSSH C19-RM) project, Mr Oluseun Adebiyi, in his presentation, described gender-based violence as a shadow pandemic because most of it is going unreported.
According to Mr Adebiyi, there has been a 69% increase in domestic sexual and emotional violence in Nigeria since the period of COVID-19, and most of the perpetrators were also victims of abuses.
The project, he said, had however been helping in making sure awareness on gender-based violence and gender human rights was increased, referral services are provided for survivors of gender abuse and human rights, and getting redressed in the case of abuse.
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