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Zip up and let�s talk!
(2)
By Sebastine
Ebhuomhan
Continued
from last Friday
Though the SFH campaign may be
novel to Nigeria, similar campaigns are already existing in other
developing countries and intervening against HIV/AIDS and other sexual
infections. For example in Uganda, which has been lauded for waging an
intervening impact against HIV/AIDS, Straight Talk, a popular monthly
newspaper published by Straight Talk Foundation Limited, Kampala, Uganda
for young people has been urging young people to raise the average age of
first sexual intercourse so as to reduce HIV and other sexual infections
in sexually active youth and reduce teenage pregnancies. Straight Talk was
inspired by a 1994 World Health Organization study of 35 sex education
programmes, which showed that �no sex� or �abstinence-based� advocacy
achieves little impact. Considering the fear of parents and adults
including political leaders who find it difficult to acknowledge the
sexuality of young people and therefore believe that increasing
adolescents� awareness and information about sex will cause them to become
promiscuous or sexually active, the situation in Britain for example,
where sexuality awareness and education is optional, indicates that only a
percentage of students have withdrawn based on parental objections,
according to a 2002 report from her Majesty�s Chief Inspector of Schools:
Sex and Relationships, published by the Office for Standards in Education
(OFSTED). Karen Katz and William Finger further emphasized this report in
Sexuality and Family Life Education Helps Prepare Young People, in a
review of over 250 programmes in the United States and Canada under the US
National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy that was published later.
From the foregoing therefore,
prevention strategies must address three core issues if the spread of
sexually transmitted infections like HIV/AIDS are to be reduced. These
are: awareness and factual information; feelings, care and values, and
skills and behaviour change. The threat of HIV and AIDS is real. While HIV
transmission can occur when blood, semen, or vaginal fluid from an
infected person enters the body of an uninfected person through a vein,
the penis, the vagina, the mouth, the anus, mucous membranes, cuts, sores
and sharing of unsterilized objects, it can also passed from an infected
mother to baby before or during birth and through breast feeding after
birth.
The devastating effects of HIV/AIDS on the
individual, family, community, nation and humanity make the focus on young
people most appropriate, timely and fitting. Besides fulfilling the
objectives of the HIV/AIDS Emergency Action Plan (HEAP) and the National
Policy on HIV/AIDS, it also meets the expectations of the United Nations
Development Assistance Framework (UNDAF) on HIV/AIDS etc. Considering the
fact that nearly half of the world�s population is under 25, the largest
youth generation in history, of which 40 percent (or 1.2 billion) are
between 15 and 24 years of age, according to a the United Nations Fund for
Population Activity (UNFPA)�s Report for 2003 and considering that by the
same year end, there had already been 2.5 million HIV/AIDS newly infected
young people between the ages of 15 and 24 in Nigeria, it goes beyond a
mere irony of fate that the greatest hope for turning the tide against
AIDS remains the security of the same young people who account for half of
all new cases of HIV infection. If you think the threat of HIV/AIDS on the
future of Nigeria is merely exaggerated, Mr. Hubert Charles, Country
Representative, United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural
Organization (UNESCO) says it is now working against the demand and supply
axis of the educational sector through a devastation of 15 and 24 years
age group. In a remark at Sheraton Hotel and Towers in Lagos early in the
year, Mr. Aido Landi UNAIDS Country Representative disclosed HIV/AIDS� new
position as the third killer in Nigeria. Whatever he did not add was
driven home by Professor Eyitayo Lambo, Minister of Health, who alerts
during a briefing in Abuja on September 7, 2004 that 3.5 million Nigerians
aged between 15 and 49 are currently infected by HIV/AIDS.
In Nigeria nowadays, most
young people become sexually active before their thirteenth birthday. In
the case of girls, they are found to be having sex at an earlier age than
boys, and their sexual partners tend to be older. Various factors such as
increasing urbanization, poverty, war, rape, forced sex, greed,
conflicting ideas about morality, sexual values and behaviour, the
breakdown of reproduction information channels, adolescent experimentation
and curiosity�all thriving upon lack of HIV information, education and
services�have all combined to push young people into early premarital
sexual activity and make them vulnerable to HIV. The vulnerability is
increased by the fact that those who have had early sexual activity often
have sex with more partners and with partners who have been at risk of HIV
exposure. The implication of this situation is that the proportion of
women (apart from men) living with HIV who are over 15 years old is 1.7
times higher in sub-Saharan African societies than in other regions
according to the Population Reference Bureau report for 2003.
My final opinion therefore is
for the nation and its citizens to adopt a new defensive approach of
knowledge and information that would emphasize abstinence, de-emphasize
early sex and unprotected sex and ensure behaviour change. Although access
to HIV/AIDS information alone is no guarantee of this change, education
does have an impact however we may consider it. The truth is that when
young people are given necessary education along with appropriate tools
and support, they can indeed become powerful agents for the change by
living up to our common hope of turning the tide of against AIDS.
Concluded
� Ebhuomhan is on the staff
of Independent Newspapers Limited.
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