Parents urged to sensitise their children about HIV

_________________

The Uganda AIDS Commission (UAC) has prayed for more parental engagement in bringing HIV discussions into the living rooms of Ugandan homes, saying this will help bring down infections that have become stubbornly high among young people in the country.

According to UAC chairperson Dr Ruth Senyonyi, almost half of new infections are now among adolescent girls and young women aged between 15 and 24.

"With the proliferation of the media, especially social media, we urge guardians and teachers to talk to your children about HIV and AIDs," she said on Wednesday (October 23, 2024) while addressing journalists at the Uganda Media Centre in Kampala.

She added that young people aged 20 and below may not know as much about the HIV pandemic as their older peers born when the scary suffering of patients was commonplace in the 1990s.

But Senyonyi hastened that the lull does not mean the virus is now no more dangerous.

"If you fail as a parent to talk about HIV and AIDS, the young people will continue getting wrong messages and become vulnerable to getting the virus," she said.

According to Senyonyi, the danger with social media and TV "doing all the talking" for parents is that these messages are not filtered and may not be age-appropriate.

"We request you, parents, to re-energise efforts to reach young people, their peers and parents with these re-engineered HIV messages since a lot of complacency has set in, as evidenced by the increasing infections among this particular group," she said.

38,000 new infections every year

The development comes as UAC notes that it currently has a total of 1.47 million people living with HIV and is experiencing at least 38,000 new infections every year.

Most of the new infections have been reported among youthful populations.

Fort Portal City has the highest HIV prevalence, currently estimated at 14.5 per cent, yet the national average now stands at 5.1 per cent.

According to UAC, Uganda’s HIV epidemic is geographically diverse, ranging from a prevalence of 8.7 per cent in South Buganda to 2.3 per cent in West Nile.

Most of the support for HIV currently is from development partners, including the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief from the US.