Failing our women and children

Last Tuesday, the world rose to mark a day set aside to raise awareness and re-strategise on one of the most grievous health challenges that has faced mankind - the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS).

The disease has decimated large populations in Africa, Asia and parts of Europe and has upturned the lives of millions of families, in Africa especially, where the number of orphans and child headed families is growing by the minute.

Most of the world has recognised the danger, which this pandemic portends for mankind. Much public and private effort has been put into containing the disease, through efforts to manage the illness and preach a new gospel in social behaviour to prevent the spread.

A United Nations agency was created to co-ordinate the fight. In Nigeria, the federal government also established the National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) in 1996, ten years after the disease was first identified in Nigeria. NACA has corresponding agencies in the 36 states and in local government councils.

Progress has indeed been made in the 13 years since NACA emerged. The fear of a backlash against people declaring their status has lessened considerably and many Nigerians now understand that testing positive for the HIV infection is not a death sentence. But there is a sense that the Nigerian government is not sufficiently engaged in the fight.

A large proportion of the money that is spent on HIV/AIDS comes from foreign agencies and governments.

Even the country's much lauded programme to provide free anti-retroviral drugs to people living with AIDS, (PLWA) which has made the lives of hundreds of thousands of patients less miserable than it would ordinarily be, is underpinned by the Presidential Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, an initiative of the United States presidency introduced by Mr. George W. Bush in 2003. The United Nations recently criticised Nigeria's performance in treatment of mother-to-child transmission (MCTC) and testing of pregnant women for HIV.

Though the rate of new infections measured in young people aged 16-24 last year, showed a marked reduction from six per cent in 2001 to 3.2 per cent in 2008, new figures also show that there are over 600,000 infants born with HIV every year.

Close to half of these do not reach their fifth birthday. The greatest danger to Nigeria's success in the fight against AIDS is now mother to child transmission. Nigeria's ramshackle public health system is partly to blame for this - and incidentally most of the treatment for HIV/AIDS is accessed through this system.

The majority of caregivers are poorly trained and over-stretched. There is still hope that the spread could be curtailed, but only if this situation is recognised for the emergency that it truly is.