HIV/AIDS in Tanzania

The president of Tanzania and his wife, a few weeks ago, publicly announced that there were gong to be tested for HIV which is major considering that there is still a lot of stigma around having HIV/AIDS here. I think the infection rate has been reduced to 7 or so percent in the last years although the official figure is probably modest according the a health minister I sat next to on the plane to Zanzibar. Still, the infection rate is much lower than other countries in the region, particularly those in southern Africa. There is a major push here now to have people tested and there are reports every day in the newspaper about the numbers of people showing up at the voluntary testing clinics. One article, however, stated that people in one district stopped going to the testing centers after it was revealed that the health care personnel where spreading rumours in villages and towns about the people who tested positive. Hopefully, they will get folks from out of the area to continue the testing there.

There is a lot of talk about HIV/AIDS in schools too. My Form 4 students were required to write a message on the topic for their Monday test, and most talked about the importance of using condoms and staying with one partner. They still have a lot of misconceptions though, such as the virus in spread only by prostitutes, that once you have it it is a death sentence (antiretroviral drugs are available here at fairly low costs), that it came originally from America, etc. I found a great article in the newspaper that discusses the gender politics of the disease....women are most vulnerable to getting HIV/AIDS for a wide variety of reasons...and my students have been assigned to read and summarize it for class on Monday. They have a lot of questions about the disease so I think this will be a really enlightening discussion for us all. More on that later.

I'm off to take a walk to town. We are about 7 kilometers from town and some of us have taken to walking in rather than getting a cab. It only takes an hour and you notice so much more when walking.