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HIV/AIDS |
INTERVIEW WITH
Araia Berhane
Head of HIV/AIDS and STI care and support unit in the National AIDS and Tuberculosis Control Division
Araia Berhane:
My name is Araia Berhane; I am the head of HIV/AIDS and STI care and support unit in the National AIDS and Tuberculosis Control Division.
Interviewer:
What role is the Global Fund playing in this?
Araia Berhane:
Actually the Global Fund is one of our main funders. We are doing many things: Procuring the necessary drugs for opportunistic infections. The other is procuring ARVs for those who need it, The third is procuring laboratory agents like CD4, blood ( testing and cell count machines), every laboratory item that is needed. Fourthly, we are furnishing sites…for data entry and analysis; we are equipping our scientists with computers- so the computers are bought from Global Fund money.
VCT is expanding …mostly it was concentrated in towns, but we are expanding to all the rural areas. For example, last year about 47,000 patients came to VCT (centers) in 12 months. This year we will have about maybe 60,000 people that visit the VCT centers. The services are all over the country now… especially now we have about 50 VCT sites all over the country.
Interviewer:
Can you give me an idea of the scale of care and treatment that is needed for HIV/AIDS in Eritrea?
Araia Berhane:
Eritrea is one of the low prevalence countries in Africa, but we are worried that with a small population, the scale is problematic…because the population of Eritrea is 3.5 million, with 5% prevalence; we estimate that about 70,000 to 100,000 people live with HIV/AIDS. That scale means that care and support is crucial, from families and from health facilities. We are providing both. The prevalence looks low, but there was a war for the last 5 or six years that affects the majority of the population, and we are surrounded by high prevalence countries like Ethiopia and some African countries.
Even now the border is closed but once peace comes and the border opens, I think there will be an influx of many people with high HIV (prevalence) rates. That is why we want to focus on both preventive aspects and on providing care for those who are sick. Most of our young people are in the army now, once demobilization starts, every army will go all over the country, that is why a plan is included to mobilize the military to include counseling and testing centers in the military and to teach the military how to behave. If they are HIV positive, they will take (HIV) all over Eritrea; that is why all prevention activities start in the military before they are demobilized. Peace will prevail and demobilization will start. They have tested, they have counseled and they are preparing to provide treatment for those who are HIV Positive.
For the time being the home based aspect is provided by Faith Based Organizations and the organization of people living with HIV/AIDS. They were providing this home based care for the last 2 or 3 years for about 3000 people and their beneficiaries are about 12,000. They are providing education, peer counseling to the people living with HIV AIDS and to their family members. We treat them for opportunistic infections, like Tuberculosis, Pneumonia, skin infections….
The next step was to provide ARVs: In Eritrea, to provide ARVs, we have been preparing ourselves for the last 2 years. What we did was to train our health workers on how to provide ARVs. The drugs arrived in 2005…ARVs are not like other drugs, where the patient comes and you just prescribe it. One of the things that it needs is counseling- several times- until the patient understands and is fully committed to taking the drugs lifelong, it needs a lot of investigations, routine blood tests , CD4 cell counts and others.
Interviewer:
You have said that maybe upto 100,000 people are HIV positive; how many need treatment?
Araia Berhane:
We think that the estimated numbers who already know their HIV status is about 12, 600… once they have ARVs in the country, all those people living with HIV/AIDS that know their status will come to the health facilities. So, the estimated number to be eligible for ARTs could be about 2000, actually. So, if we estimate about 2000 every year, Eritrea will be able to provide all AIDS patients with ARVs.
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|  | | | GLOBAL FUND PROGRAMS IN
ERITREA | | | Total Funding Request: | $85,725,740 | | Approved Maximum*: | $49,818,434 | | * total Approved Funding for Phase 1 & Phase 2 |
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