According to UNAIDS Gap Report 2016, about 3.5 million people are projected to live with Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) in Nigeria as at 2015.
This fact might mean something not short of a good news, first being that figures of infected persons and rate of infection is on a steady decline. The second and most important is that the virus cannot be transmitted when one shares a space with a stranger in a taxi or shakes hands at a business meeting. But what would your reaction be if you knew before a handshake, that the other person were HIV positive? Not many people have learnt to handle this without being apprehensive. This only reveals that stigmatization (a lack of love and human respect) is borne of baseless fear.
Though for many years and in what might even be considered an over-flogged sensitization, the public has been educated on how people can and cannot be infected by the dreaded AIDS, the issue of doing away with stigmatization is still at the moment considerably far-fetched. On the 3rd of February 2015, Former President Goodluck Jonathan signed into law the Human Immunodeficiency Virus/Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) Anti-Discrimination bill 2014. This law protects the rights of people living with HIV/AIDS and shows the government’s commitment to shunning all forms of AIDS-related stigmatization. But the truth remains that no law can make anyone be truly concerned for others; antidiscrimination remains a choice.
Hopefully, advancements in science are bringing us steps closer to a triumph over the virus which has claimed millions of lives since its discovery in the past thirty years. Antiretroviral therapies have helped people with HIV live longer healthier lives, have lowered chances of spreading the virus from person to person and have greatly reduced the development of HIV into AIDS. On the 24th of November, the first clinical HIV vaccine efficacy study (HVTN 702) in over seven years was carried out by the United States National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to test efficient prevention in South Africa. Today, the World Health Organization will empower people to test for HIV with its launch of new self-testing guidelines.
It is believed that in the near future, the battle over AIDS will be won. But would this victory be claimed by the efforts of science alone? Could it be said that just before AIDS was conquered, humans of both statuses lived together with no sword of stigmatization keeping them divided?
To a world free of stigma on World AIDS Day.