7 News Belize

Tailoring HIV Message For Teens
posted (July 7, 2015)
Regularly, we tell you on the news how the National AIDS Commission, works to drive down the number of new cases of HIV/AIDS infections. Most of the efforts have been focused on adults, but what about youths and adolescents? Recent studies have shown a spike in teenaged pregnancies, which suggests a simultaneous increase in sexually active youths. That also means that the corresponding risk of new HIV infections is increasing in that group, and so the NAC has been preparing a strategy tailored for that population.

For a few months, the commission members did research in Jamaica where they travelled around with that country's Ministry of Health. Today, they unveiled the corresponding strategy for youths at a workshop for all the advocates and workers trying to lower this endemic in Belize. Here's what the coordinators told us about it:

Sherlene Tablada - Consultant, Behavior Change Communication, NAC
"What we've done, we've brought together about 60 stakeholders from a number of organizations across the country to focus on adolescence and youth prevention in HIV, as this is one of the gaps in the national response. We have strategies to address many vulnerable populations, but currently we do not have national strategy that addresses adolescence and youth."

Gustavo Perrera - Executive Director, NAC
"While in Belize the concentration of the epidemic has been more among men at the adult level, we have found that recently through various studies that adolescence and youth are in fact greatly affected by HIV or are vulnerable at this point and we thought that we also need to put in place some interventions to address some of the risks and also the situation that is presently affecting adolescence and youth."

Ivan Yerovi - Representative, UNICEF
"Whenever the adolescence are going to have sex - adolescence are having sex. Let not pretend they don't do it. They are doing it right. Let's have them access to education and let's make available condoms or whatever they would like to choose to prevent not only HIV, infection, teenage pregnancy etc."

Sherlene Tablada
"Currently we see that the data is showing us that we have over 60% of our young persons between the age of 15 and 24 that are sexually active. The situation has changed whereby social norms and behaviors of young people have changed and therefore for us the challenge is, how do you identify new and innovative approaches to reach young people? They are a dynamic population in order to get them engaged and interested. We need to create just different programs, different interventions, different activities that will attract them. This is an area where limited resources are available and young people are really a target in HIV prevention and therefore for us, the challenge is how do we use the limited resources we have available to create the kinds of programs and interventions that will effectively reach our young people."

Sannia Sutherland - Representative, Jamaican Ministry of Health
"Last year we supported a mission that came from Belize from your national youth service, your Belize Family Planning Association etc. and what we did was we supported them to go out on field visits and to actually feel our program. Our national HIV/AIDS response has been pretty strong in maintaining the prevalence below 1% among our youth population and so what they wanted to do was get a feel for how we've done it and see what we've done and actually view our intervention. So they really got into it and they were a part of the team and went to all our sites; our high risks sites, our low risks sites, juts to see what happens and how we do it."

Reporter
"Talk to us about that: the interventions that you guys have in place in Jamaica?"

Sannia Sutherland
"What we do is we have a package of interventions and our package of interventions included HIV testing outreach settings. It also includes a risk reduction conversation as well as condom distribution. Of course we are cognizant of the age of consent and so without parental supervision, a person cannot consent to getting an HIV test if they are below the age of consent. However, is that person is a high risk and after counseling, has really given us evidence that they are at risk, we will conduct the test and do the necessary communication to our child development agency of the risk that this young person is under."

The workshop continued all day today.

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