TT seeks 1,700 people with HIV

The Health Ministry is seeking to find 1,700 people who are HIV positive and do not know.

And a public health campaign on HIV/Aids for Carnival 2018 is part of the strategy to locate infected people and get them on treatment, Health Minister Terrence Deyalsingh disclosed on Monday. Deyalsingh, after visiting newborns at Port of Spain General Hospital on Christmas Day, told reporters the ministry had seen an increase in cases of men over 60 and an increase in young girls with HIV/Aids, which he said was worrisome. These demographics, he said, would be targeted in the campaign.

Deyalsingh said there are 11,000 reported cases of people living with HIV/Aids in TT. TT is a signatory to a global convention that the world should be Aids free by 2030. Deyalsingh said some targets were set to be achieved by 2020.

“Those targets are called the 90/90/90 targets, which means that any country should know the number of persons with HIV or Aids. In TT, that figure is about 11,000.”

According to unaids.org this means that by 2020, 90 per cent of all people living with HIV will know their HIV status; 90 per cent of all people with diagnosed HIV infection will receive sustained antiretroviral therapy, and 90 per cent of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy will have viral suppression.

Deyalsingh said TT was at about 83 per cent on the first target, however it had two years to find an estimated 1,700 people who may be HIV-positive and do not know.

“Our challenge, now it is to find 1,700 people who we suspect are HIV-positive but don’t know their status.

Between the National Aids Coordinating committee under the Office of the Prime Minister and the Ministry of Health which is responsible for the clinical response, we are now working out strategies to find those 1,700 people and with Carnival coming up you will see a public education programme to tackle that,” he said.

Deyalsingh said the ministry knew 1,700 people did not know their status through a UNAIDS software simulation programme called Spectrum. This, he said, takes the known cases in every country and matches the data with certain characteristics and a simulation produces the figure.

He said no country would know for sure who has HIV or not but rather the figure “is an estimation based on software analysis and data mining, based on the actual number you do know plus variables of that particular country. You feed that into the software and UNAIDS comes up with estimation of that country.”

Asked how far along TT was in the second target, Deyalsingh said, “Currently, we are on about 75 per cent of that.”