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Health& Living
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Written by Diana Nabiruma
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Thursday, 19 November 2009 12:59 |
Uganda Health Marketing Group’s (UHMG) new “One Love” campaign that tells people to “Get off the Sexual Network” is quite provocative.
Who has ever thought that they are part of a network, not a telecom one but a sexual one? I bet you, not that many of us. As we go about sleeping with this one and the other one, we never imagine that they are sleeping with another person who is sleeping with yet another one and the chain goes on and on.
Emily Katarikawe, Managing Director of UHMG, says most married people have “take-aways” yet these “take-aways” also have their own spouses which spouses also have “take-aways” and so on and so forth. But because of the blinding trust brought on by a long term sexual relationship we never believe that the spouses or “take-aways” have other sexual partners and it is this trust that eventually results in our demise. The demise here being contracting HIV.
Dr. David Kihumuro Apuuli, director of Uganda AIDS Commission says that everyone should read the “Invisible Cure”: Africa, the West and the Fight against AIDS, a book written by Helen Epstein and from it, we will begin to appreciate the profound role sexual networking plays in increasing the rate of new infections.
According to Epstein (who was based in Uganda as a molecular biologist in the 1990s), people in the West have more sexual partners in their lifetime than their peers in Africa but the rate of spread of HIV is higher in Africa than in the West. This is the case because in Africa, people have long term sexual relationships with their fewer sexual partners. Like I mentioned earlier, this results in the building of trust which means that people stop using protection and the spread of HIV is given a big helpful shove to the skies.
There is therefore a need to get off the sexual networks if we are to curb the spread of HIV. Dr. Kihumuro warns that the rate at which HIV is spreading (prevalence is at 46%), there is bound to be a crisis as the resources available to treat AIDS do not match the demand.
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