16 Sep 2014

The National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA) coordinator, Ms Grace Muzila has advised patients against defaulting on treatment.

Speaking at the World Oral Health Week in Tutume recently, Ms Muzila lamented that some diseases turned out to be resistant to treatment as a result of patients defaulting on their medication.

As a result, she said, some patients ended up dying because of mindless mistakes, adding that, in the past, it was tuberculosis that was known to be resistant to treatment, but HIV/AIDS also had been identified to be resistant to treatment if people surpassed all the treatment stage of the epidemic.

She pointed out that, while medication was received for free from government facilities, it came at cost to the state; therefore; defaulting on treatments could only add to increased costs for the government.

Furthermore, she highlighted that, despite the intense fight against the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the country still experienced death from that area accounting for almost 10 000 deaths annually.

Ms Muzila said behavioral change was important because, although the numbers had reduced significantly when compared to the first time HIV/AIDS case was found in 2001, it was still a concern to have such a number of people losing their lives despite so many awareness and educational messages.

She stated that research showed that people engaged in multi concurrent partners (MCPs), which had increased from 11 per cent to about 15 per cent, adding that it raised questions of responsibility of people towards their health and that of their partners.

She added that engaging in MCPs was one of the factors that led to the rapid spread of the virus and that should be a concern for every individual to make sure that they stuck to one partner.

With such behavior, she said it would help the country to reach its target of zero new infections by 2016 while at the same time help the government to sustain the medication bill instead of having to increase the budget because of increased number of patients.

“Let us be responsible citizens by doing the right things for our health,” she concluded. ENDS