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Guyana to launch ground-breaking HIV document tomorrow

Mar 23, 2010 News

Guyana will tomorrow become the first country to have a comprehensive set of national principles, standards and guidelines for the prevention of HIV – all in one document.
Based on five national HIV prevention principles, the Guyana National Prevention Standards are composite standards designed to ensure a high-level quality of activities toward HIV prevention that, according to the Ministry of Health National AIDS Programme Secretariat (NAPS), “must never be compromised.”
Recommended HIV prevention guidelines are included, and so is a “scorecard” for rating of prevention activities and instruments in their various stages of development.
Minister of Health, Dr Leslie Ramsammy, and the Guyana Co-ordinator of the Joint United Nations programme on AIDS (UNAIDS), Dr Ruben del Prado, will launch the document at the Pegasus.
Minister Ramsammy, in a foreword in the document, said that the introduction of these principles, standards and guidelines “is the tangible expression of our determination to establish prevention as the pillar of our national HIV response in Guyana.”
He said that the impetus for ensuring that the appropriate capacity and resources are available to deliver these standards lies with the Ministry of Health and its partners.  The Ministry and its partners have the responsibility for overall programme and performance management and for taking the lead in designing prevention activities and shaping their improvement and modernisation.
“The onus is now on the prevention makers to ensure that HIV prevention products and services are delivered in line with these standards, by the most effective and efficient means possible,” Ramsammy stated.
There is a loud call from UNAIDS and the global scientific community for countries to implement HIV prevention programmes that will be truly effective in reducing new HIV infections.
This requires a strategic combination of activities that address behaviours that put people at higher risk for and more vulnerable to HIV infection and that utilise behaviour and social change methods that are effective, appropriate and are informed by evidence.
According to the document, a dramatic scaling up of HIV prevention, combined with increased access to treatment for the millions already infected can control and ultimately reverse the global pandemic.
Efforts at intensifying HIV prevention need to first understand the nature of the epidemic and the dynamic environment in which it thrives and incorporate this into prevention programming to ensure effectiveness, the document states.
It stressed that understanding the epidemic, specifically its patterns and trends, and the driving forces behind it from an economic, social, cultural and behavioural perspective will help define higher risk behaviour and situations, and the issues that preventive actions need to address in a more targeted and focused manner, in both the short and long term.
Principle 1 of the document states that in Guyana, HIV prevention is multi-sectoral, multi-dimensional, aligned with One National Programme, of a scope and mix that is effective, at an intensity that is sustained, and of a scale to reach and impact everyone.

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