How Many Nigerians Are Living With HIV?
This has been an
increasingly controversial question recently. Understanding the burden
of HIV in Nigeria is more important now than ever before, because, aside
from Nigeria having the second
largest population of people living with
HIV, and only being able to find about 750,000 people to put on
treatment, we are also the subject of an embarrassing Global Fund
investigation.
In July this year, many Nigerians working on HIV/AIDS will attend the next International Conference on AIDS
holding in South Africa, only the second time ever it's being held in
Africa, with the inevitable scrutiny this will bring the HIV response in
Nigeria. Your Nigeria Health Watch team will make sure that you do not
miss a thing from the conference in Durban.
The official HIV prevalence by UNAIDS in Nigeria is 3.2% among the adult population, giving a total estimate of 3.4 million Nigerians living with HIV, and not 5 million as widely reported by Nigerian newspapers recently. The most recent national prevalence survey
for HIV carried out in Nigeria in 2013/14, undertaken by the National
AIDS and STI Control Programme of the Federal Ministry of Health, put
overall HIV prevalence among women attending antenatal clinics in
Nigeria at 3.0%. In Nigeria, as in most countries with generalized
epidemics, national HIV estimates are based on surveillance systems that
focus on pregnant women who attend a selected number of sentinel
antenatal clinics. The major assumption here is that prevalence among
pregnant women is a good approximation of prevalence among the adult
population of men and women (15-49 years). Since the first case of AIDS
in Nigeria was reported in 1986, Nigeria adopted ANC sentinel
surveillance as the system for monitoring the epidemic, in line with WHO
guidelines. The first HIV Sentinel Survey in 1991 showed a prevalence
of 1.8%. Subsequent sentinel surveys produced results as illustrated in
the graph below. The epidemic appears to have peaked in about 2001 and
has been on the decline since then.
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