20 million Nigerians ‘ll be infected with HIV/AIDS by 2020’

Dapo Falade, Ado-Ekiti - 17.09.2009

THE Chief Executive Officer of the Women Initiative for Development and Environmental Protection (WIDEP), a non-governmental organisation, Professor Funke Egunjobi, has warned that over 20 million Nigerians would be affected by HIV/AIDS disease by 2020 if measures are not taking to curtail the growing menace of the disease.

While warning governments at all levels to take the fight against the spread of the HIV/AIDS epidemic serious, the NGO executive said those who would be affected were young people below 15 years, lamenting that this would increase infant mortality rate, which was presently growing at an alarming rate in the country.

Egunjobi made the revelation, while speaking at a two-day workshop in Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State, on Tuesday, adding that WIDEP got the statistics from the research conducted by the United Nations Children Emergency Funds (UNICEF) into the rate of the spread of the scourge in the country.

Expressing regrets that various governments in the country had been paying lip service to the war against the disease, she said the attitude of those in positions of authority to the disease had been dissuading people from making themselves available for test.

He said the workshop was organised in collaboration with the African Women Development Fund (AWDF), adding that the high rate of stigmatisation of the people living with the disease called for attention.

On the increasing high infertility rate among African women, she advised that women should refrain from reading spiritual meanings into barrenness, saying that they should rather go for intensive medical care in competent hospitals to ascertain the cause of their barrenness.

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there will be HIV spread as long as guys and guys are not having safe sex
there will be HIV spread as long as girls and girls are not having safe sex
please dont take risk sex is over rated and HIV is real