Corruption, poor healthcare playing huge roles in mother-to-child HIV transmission in Nigeria
There is a disturbing high rate of HIV-infected babies in Nigeria, studies by the National Agency for the Control of AIDS have shown.
About 21.58% of HIV-infected, pregnant Nigerian women transmitted the virus to their children in 2016, according to the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS.
Despite that the rate of mother-to-child transmission has significantly reduced in many developing countries, many infected pregnant women in Nigeria continue to infect their babies with the deadly virus because they aren’t even aware of their status.
Added to a poor healthcare system, ignorance and poverty play major roles in preventing these infected pregnant women from seeking good medical care.
The director of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in Washington, D.C., Deborah Birx, said in a report that pregnant women also suffer from inability to afford a “formal” fee that the government levies for care at a clinic.
Birx says the fee “opens the door” for others to tack on more insidious “informal” fees which are “very hard to police”.
“If you want to get your lab results back or you want to get your blood drawn, that nurse may charge you,” she explains.
Birx says it was discovered that when one state in the country eliminated the formal fee, the number of women who came to clinics for antenatal care doubled.
Nigeria is estimated to have about 3.2 million people living with the deadly virus. In 2016, Nigeria accounted for 37,000 of the world’s 160,000 new cases of babies born with HIV.
And because of huge dedication to religion across the country, many pregnant women would rather receive “blessings” and “healing” from religious leaders, rather than visit the hospital for proper diagnosis and treatment.
Sani Aliyu, the head of NACA appointed by President Buhari in 2016, said that putting an end to the epidemic in the country, depends on treating nearly everyone who is living with the virus – not just mothers and babies.
“It’s going to be a lot of work to put everybody with HIV on treatment,” he says.
He, however, said protecting babies from infection “should be a low-hanging fruit that can be reached.”
Aliyu said the federal government has been taking steps to prevent mother-to-child transmission, authorizing federal funds to pay for 60,000 new HIV-infected people to receive ARVs.
“The program, if successful, will serve as the exit gateway for PEPFAR as future programs acquire national ownership status,” he says.
