Nigerian government identifies 1.7 million out of 1.9 million Nigerians living with HIV

The Nigerian Government has confirmed that it has identified 1.7 million out of 1.9 million Nigerians  living with HIV, a statistic said to have been made available by the National Agency for Control of Aids(NACA) confirmed.

Penpushing reports that Director of Community Prevention, Care and Support Services of the agency, Alex Ogundipe  made this known in Calabar adding that 1.7 million afflicted had been enrolled for treatment.

“Our mandate is to identify people living with the virus; there are supposed to be about 1.9 million Nigerians. It is our responsibility to identify and enroll all of them for care and I believe we are doing well because we have identified 1.7 million of them’, Ogundipe said.

“NACA is on the right path in terms of its mandate to coordinate activities on HIV response. You must be objective on how you rate or assess yourself. You must ask: is the assessment from the eyes of those who give you money, those of beneficiaries of your services or those other partners? These are the criteria we check once in a while to help fine-tune our services,” he added.

Penpushing further reports that, Ogundipe speaking on the moribund nature of State Agencies for the control of AIDS (SACA), said State Agency for Control of Aids( SACA) was not a branch of National Agency for Control of Aids(NACA) explaining that they belong to state .

The Director noted that it was the responsibility of National Agency for Control of Aids(NACA) to train, guide and give policy direction to State Agency  Control of Aids(SACA) officials, but that it was left for the state governments to fund them and ensure they carried out HIV response services.

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