HIV: Police women in Malawi highly infected

The Malawi police service has a high HIV prevalence rate among its service women, an update on the Malawi National Response to HIV/AIDS indicates. The report recently presented at the national media conference in Lilongwe indicates that 32 percent female police officers are currently infected with HIV.
Presenting the update, Davie Kalomba head of planning and evaluation in the ministry of health said although the country’s HIV/AIDS prevalence rate was currently on the decline in the country, there were some specific groups that continued to register high HIV rates.

“Currently the high risk group is the age block 15 to 24, however it is very interesting to note that the infections were currently increasing in groups that are very knowledgeable,” he said. The update indicates that brothel based sex workers top the chart with an HIV prevalence rate of 70 percent.

Kalomba said the country had more persons living with HIV in rural areas estimated at 630 000 as opposed to the urban which has 179745 persons living with HIV and out of these, 89, 055 are children below the age 15.

“Currently women are the ones that are highly infected as out of the 809, 833 persons living with HIV in the country 473, 000 are women,” he said.

Currently Malawi has had 2.8 million people that have ever gone for HIV testing. In 2007 and 2008 alone the country tested over 1 million people.

As a way of scaling up HIV testing and counseling services the country in 2006 introduced the HIV Testing and Counseling (HTC) week which was the first of its kind in the world and has since been described as a success.

Last year, 187,000 people got tested in the week of which 53 percent were female and 47 percent were male. Meanwhile another HIV Testing and Counseling week is being planned for November.