Government rolls out HIV self-testing as part of measures to curb spread of the disease

3 News

Thu 05th Sep, 2024 17:18

Ineffective HIV testing strategies implemented by the Ghana Health Service over the years have been blamed for the country’s struggle to make progress towards achieving the 95-95-95 global targets.

For this reason, Government with its partners are scaling up the HIV self-testing initiative to boost HIV Testing Services coverage with focus on men.

Out of the estimated 334,000 people living with HIV, only 65% of them know their HIV status. While out of that number, only 69% are on treatment. The Ghana Aids Commission reports that more than a 100 thousand people are living with the virus but do not know their status.

In order to address this concern, government with support from the Global Fund introduced the HIV self-testing (HIVST) initiative last year.

This year, the project is being scaled up to boost HIV Testing Services (HTS) coverage by improving case findings and locating hard-to-reach populations especially the men who may otherwise not be reached by traditional approaches to HIV testing services.

Ahead of the project implementation, a three-day training workshop has been held for some 50 civil society organizations who will champion the cause in 50 HIV high-burden districts across the country.

President of the GHANA HIV and AIDS Network, Ernest Amoabeng Ortsin at the opening session of the workshop entreated participants to focus on men.

” As part of the strategy for the implementation, special focus will be placed on getting more men to test for HIV through self-testing. According to him, even though the national data shows that more females are infected than males, any time groups of males and females are randomly tested, the yield in the male population is often higher than female population,” Mr Ortsin said.

This he said, means that, “if more effort is directed towards getting men to test, it would be possible for the country to find more of the missing HIV cases.”

Programmes Manager of the National AIDS/STI Control Programme, Dr. Stephen Ayisi Addo is confident with all stakeholders on board, a major impact can be achieved in the country’s response initiatives.

“The continuation of the project by GHANET was based on the Network’s innovative approach to the rollout last year. The country is currently not making much progress given that out of the estimated 334000 people living with HIV, only 65% of them know their status. Of the number that know their status, only 69% has been put on treatment and of those on treatment about 89% have achieved viral suppression,” he explained.

Some of the topics that were treated during the three-day training included basic facts about HIV and AIDS, prevention of sexual exploitation, abuse and harassment, community demand generation for HIVST, as well as narrative report writing and basic project accounting.

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