We need to escalate our HIV awareness programs – Dr. Fong

We need to escalate a lot of our HIV awareness programs as is it was always only the Ministry of Health with minimal engagement of other sectors.

The Permanent Secretary for Health, Dr. James Fong stated this when questioned on what the Ministry is doing in terms of awareness as there are high numbers of HIV positive cases in the country.

Dr. Fong says they want to engage other partners like the Ministry of iTaukei Affairs and the Republic of Fiji Military Force because they have a big civilian budget and once they go out to do some engineering work, they can utilise their outreach to do some awareness.

The Permanent Secretary says they also intend to work with the Police.

He further says with any government entity, as they reach out into the community they want to put a thematic area of HIV and AIDS prevention out there, but more importantly, to be able to discuss more openly issues around sexual health.

The Permanent Secretary says for us sexual health is the biggest discussion and our problem with HIV/AIDS is the stigma which is undermining our ability to respond.

Dr. Fong says we now have the ability to give medicine to a person with HIV such that their viral load will be so low that most of them will die of old age or another disease but not from AIDS.

He adds the only issue now is that those who are positive are diagnosed and are on the treatment and every time they default, they have a reminder to ensure they take their medicine.