By Umar Bayo Abdulwahab
A university teacher who specialises in research on HIV/AIDS infection at the university of Ilorin, Prof. Salami Kazeem, has raised alarm over rising cases of HIV infection amongst married sexual partners.
The professor of medicine said the HIV/AIDS management centre of University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital (UITH) has so far delivered over 300 infected pregnant women of free HIV infected babies.
Kazeem, whose lecture was entitled “Realities of Living with HIV infection,” said many sexual partners still engage in unprotected sex despite high level of awareness.
He said Nigeria after India and South Africa was the third country in the world carrying with the disease burden which he noted had a lot of negative socio- economic effects on its citizenry.
He said: “The incidence of new infection is rising and becoming worrisome in Nigeria. New infection is recorded largely amongst married sexual partners who are not ready to let go of each other even long after marriages to different spouses. Here the use of condom is low and risk of transmission is high. Some high risk group of the society also contributes significantly to the rising rate of the new infection.
“They are hotel and road side based FSWs. They and their clients together with their client partners contributed about 40 per cent of new infections in 2010. Men having sex with men (MSM), and injection drug users (IDUs) and their partners also contributed 10 per cent and nine per cent annual new infections during the same year.”
The university teacher however said that the UITH HIV/AIDS clinical centre had successfully delivered over 300 women infected with HIV virus of babies that were free from the virus through it mother to child prevention care.
“Over 300 women who are positively leaving with HIV in our centre have been successfully delivered of HIV free babies.”
He said the centre had also successfully arranged 27 marriages between those already infected with the virus to curtail the spread of the diseases.
The professor of medicine warned that there was no cure found yet the virus, stressing that all the recent claims by some people, including the Abalaka, about the discovery in Nigeria had not been established to effectively cure the disease.
