Carec records fall in HIV/AIDS rate

Speaking during the launch of the Caribbean Tripartite Council (CTC) PANCAP Global Fund Project on HIV/AIDS yesterday, Hospedales said he stressed on cautious optimism because HIV/AIDS is silent, and society must not let its guard down and believe that the fight has been won.

According to Hospedales, the epidemic curve of how the HIV/AIDS incidence has behaved over the years has changed. The growth of the curve, which began in the early 1980s, was expediential until about 1995, when the curve was discovered to be rising slowly. Between 2001-2002, the curve began to level off.

Beginning in 2002, Carec recorded a decline in the number of reported cases of HIV/AIDS in TT every year.

In the Bahamas there has been a marked reduction in the AIDS cases and deaths, a reduction in transmission from mother to child and in pregnant women. In Haiti, HIV/AIDS prevalence among pregnant women has dropped from six-seven percent within the last 12 years.

In Barbados, there was a reduction in the mortality rate caused by HIV/AIDS at the end of 2002, and a big reduction in the transmission of the virus from mother to child. In Bermuda, the number of HIV/AIDS cases was also reduced.

Hospedales said the factors contributing to the noticeable improvement in the Caribbean had to do with political commitment, the implementation of an expanded approach to prevention and control, the scaling up of care and treatment and the introduction of affordable anti-retro viral treatment. "These have all begun to turn the HIV/AIDS epidemic around. There is light at the end of the tunnel," said Hospedales.

The Caribbean ranks second in the world with the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS, just below Sub-Saharan Africa. Within the past 15-20 years since the discovery of HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean in 1983, thousands of lives have been lost to the epidemic.

In TT about 5,000-6,000 people have died, 110,000 have been affected in the Caricom region, and in the wider Caribbean half a million people, including Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico have been affected. The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (Eclac) revealed that 2.4 million people in Latin American and the Caribbean hemisphere were living with HIV/AIDS in 2004, with 21 percent living in the Caribbean. Between 2002-2004, the number increased by 200,000 and by some 20,000 in the Caribbean alone.

Haiti is the region’s highest affected by HIV/AIDS, followed by Trinidad and Tobago, the Bahamas, Guyana and Belize.