29 May 2017

National AIDS Coordinating Agency (NACA) coordinator, Mr Richard Matlhare has called on parents, the community and village leaders to address issues of moral decadence, teenage pregnancy, school dropouts as well as alcohol and drug abuse.

Mr Matlhare was speaking at the National AIDS Candlelight Memorial Service in Mahalapye recently.

He said such were a problem in the fight against HIV/AIDS, explaining that government was only a facilitator in so far as lifestyle related and non-communicable diseases were concerned.

The responsibility, he said, was for individuals, hence the statement, ‘your health your responsibility’.

Mr Matlhare said a report on behavioural survey of 2016 by the Ministry of Basic Education showed that 22 per cent of the 13 to 19-year-old students interviewed, reported having had sexual intercourse.

He said the proportion of students who reported to having had sex before 13 years was 33 per cent, an increase from 17 per cent in 2010.

He said among this group of students, 13 per cent reported transactional sex while 22 per cent experienced forced or coerced sex.

Therefore, Mr Matlhare noted that parents would be deluded to think such happened to other people’s children and not their own.

“We have fought a good fight, but we have not finished the race, we are slowly losing the faith that we have kept all along and complacency is gradually setting in and there is no doubt we are back sliding,” Mr Matlhare said.

He also explained that one in two women aged 35 years were living with HIV, up to 36.3 per cent of Batswana did not know their HIV status and that only 47.9 per cent of people aged 15-24 had comprehensive knowledge of HIV/AIDS.

Condom use, Mr Matlhare said had dropped from 78.4 per cent to 65.2 per cent among the same age group.

Further, he explained that the country had made strides in significantly reducing HIV infection from an incidence rate of 1.4 per cent to 1.3 per cent translating to a decrease of 15 000 to 10 000 infections annually.

He said deaths also reduced from 21 000 to 5 000 per year, adding that people were no longer buried in large numbers, courtesy of ARVs.

He said there was reduction of mother to child infection rate from about 60 per cent to below one per cent currently.

However, Mr Matlhare said the war was still far from over, and the nation had a serious HIV burden that demanded high level of seriousness and responsibility.

The International AIDS Candlelight Memorial started in 1983 and takes place every third Sunday of May.

It is led by a coalition of some 1 200 community organisations in 115 countries.

Mr Matlhare said this was started by people living with HIV to give face to the epidemic and served as an important intervention for global solidarity, breaking down barriers of stigma and discrimination and giving hope to new generations. ENDS