National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) SURE-P has commenced the testing and counseling of one million persons in the country.
Project Director of NACA SURE-P, Dr Sebastian Wakdok while speaking during an outreach programme in Abuja said “we are in over 30 states, last week we started with about seven states and this week eleven states concurrently and next week we should be ending. It’s a multi disease outreach not only for HIV AIDS but also to test them for diabetes, hypertension and other diseases.
“The vision as we know, much as possible now there is a vision called the 9090 strategy whereby you test as much as 90 percent of the population and out of those 90 percent of the population those who are positive 90 percent of them you link them to care and those 90 percent when you put them on treatment, 90 percent of them you expect viral suppression and we that you don’t expect to transmit the virus to people because we think prevention as much as is said is better than cure.
“Those who are positive we treat while those who are negative we continue to tell them to remain negative so this is one of the yearly outreaches that NACA adopts just as we did in 2014 and we are doing it in 2015 and we are flagging it off here in Mpape Abuja.
“Those who are positive we can link to care and those who are negative we continue to be negative and those who have either high blood pressure, high sugar, malaria, hepatitis we link them to the appropriate care. For children under five and pregnant women we give them mosquito nets and de-worm the children also.
“Averagely we are doing two local governments in each of the states including the FCT so at least more than one site and each of that sites we are expecting atleast to test between 7,000 and 10,000 to know their status.
“That means an average of 20,000 in two local governments in the states for the 30 states. And we are doing this not only under the HIV AIDS programme in NACA, that is gotten funded from the proceeds that we got from SureP but also the millennium development goal is funding some of the components of the project so we are hoping that at the end of the day when we pull together we should be able to test at least a million Nigerians within the phase of this programme.”
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