The National Aids Commission is holding its first National HIV Prevention Summit over the next 3 days. The summit starts tomorrow and Executive Director of the National Aids Commission Doctor Martin Cuellar says that they will be looking at what Belize has been doing in HIV prevention:
Martin Cuellar, Director of the National Aids Commission
"It is a chance for us to kind of regroup as a national response to HIV. We are bringing in partners from all over country who work in HIV but in particular in prevention both from the side of people who collect data, who create statistics that help us to see where our prevention gaps, where are the highest areas of risk. As well as those who then respond to those risks with interventions and the idea that is driving this initiative is that in 2013 Belize has to look at what we have been doing? Where do we see successes? Where do we see the larger loop holes? Then consienciously get together to come up with a new plan so that in the next two or three years we know that we are doing a better job, we know that we are being more relevant, more specific, responding in a more successful way to the specific gaps that we identify and then we expect that we will start to see the overall impact which we're looking for, which is, reduction in the number of new cases as well as extension of life and quality of life for those who are already affected."
Monica Bodden
"Could you speak to us about the importance of that."
Martin Cuellar
"Exactly, what we find is that there are many indicators of success over the past five, seven years equally there are many indicators that a lot of what we have done has not taken us to the place we want to be. We look at evidence that such as the number of condom use, nationally, in all of our sub populations still hovers around thirty percent. We're talking about thirty percent consistent condom use among youth, among heterosexual couples, among men who have sex with men, among even people who are living with HIV already so we have been spending thousands of dollars over the past five years promoting comdom use and still we are seeing that low average. That is one good indicator of why it is so important that we start rethinking prevention and scaling up our efforts which does not mean doing more of the same but it means finding new methodologies and new mechanisms for us to get into the specific sub populations that we are targeting so that we have a better chance for actual behaviour change."
The National HIV Prevention Summit will be taking place at the Belize Biltmore Plaza. It starts tomorrow and ends on Saturday.
Email
Print