Sunyani-Ghana, Dec. 14, GNA – The Sunyani Office of the Ghana AIDS Commission (GAC) has distributed 7,846 pieces of condoms within two days to the staff of 38 institutions/organisations through its ‘Condom Activation’ exercise in the Sunyani Municipality.
Additionally, 670 lubricants were distributed while 75 tests were conducted as part of the exercise which formed part of the 20th anniversary celebration of the GAC and the observation of the 2022 World AIDS Day celebration.
Besides giving some amount of condoms and lubricants to the heads of the institutions and organisations to share with their staff to use for safe sex, the Commission reached out to the public too to interact and gave education on condom usage and its benefit.
The exercise was also used as a medium to do door-to-door HIV testing to enable people to take advantage of its convenience to test and know their status.
Speaking to the Ghana News Agency in an interview in Sunyani, Mr Ahmed Ibrahim Bambilla, the Bono, Bono East, and Ahafo Regional Technical Coordinator of the GAC said Ghana had subscribed to the global fast-track target of achieving 95 95 95.
Mr. Bambilla explained that meant the country needed to get 95 per cent of the population living with HIV to know their status, 95 per cent of all people with diagnosed HIV infection to receive sustained antiretroviral therapy and 95 per cent of all people receiving antiretroviral therapy to have viral suppression by 2025.
”We can only attain these three 95 with a lot of testing and that is why we have included the testing into the condom activation exercise to get a lot more people to test”, he indicated.
Mr Bambilla reiterated the Bono region’s HIV prevalence rate currently was high, saying the region was leading in the whole country with 2.61 per cent among the general population and 4.5 among pregnant women.
”As a country, the national HIV prevalence among the general population is 1.65 per cent and 2 per cent among pregnant women, but that of the Bono region is on a higher side”, he stressed.
Mr. Bambilla therefore called for a collaborative effort for stakeholders in the region to educate more people to be cautious of their sexual lives, saying “we must promote healthy sexual lifestyles, especially among the youth and the adolescents to practise safe sex if they cannot abstain to reduce the new HIV infections in the region.”
