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WORLD AIDS DAY CELEBRATIONS: President Puts Emphasis on HIV/AIDS Prevention as he Cautions Ugandans Against Prostitution.

“There are certain things that you cannot do when you are infected. Like in the army, we discovered that when somebody over-exerts himself with the virus, it can cause a problem. Therefore,  don’t say let me get infected since the drugs are available and I will live a normal life. You will not die but you will have deducted on your capacity,” he said.

The President made the remarks today during the World AIDS Day commemoration held at Bukungu Primary School, Bukungu Town Council, Buyende District.

President Museveni explained that AIDS is really a problem caused by indiscipline.

“When we analyzed when it was threatening us, we found that AIDS was just from three points. Number one was prostitution, number two was blood transfusion before we checked the blood of the givers, then number three was from mother to child transmission in the womb,” he said.

“But to show that it’s not really a serious disease, when you take the mother to child transmission, even without any intervention, we found out that only 30 percent would pass from mother to child even if the mother had the virus. Initially we were worried that it was going through mosquito bites and so on. But then we found that it was not possible. So, we closed the route of blood transfusion. The one for mother to child we also closed it; because the technology which would stop transmission from mother to child became available.”

The President further cautioned Ugandans against prostitution, saying that it’s the main cause of HIV/AIDS infections.

“You people please don’t keep playing around with this problem. Yes, the drugs are there to suppress the virus, but it’s not eliminated. But the advantage we are looking for in suppressing the virus is that when it is much suppressed, the virus doesn’t spread so much,” he advised.

“Please stop this indiscipline. All Ugandans should stop living a risky life. You hear the statistics that there are 39 million people with the virus in the whole world. People in the whole world are like 7 billion. Now out of the 39 million, 1.4 million are in Uganda, which is a high figure. Why should this be the case?” he wondered.

During the pre-event to the commemorations, MJAP conducted integrated health camps at Kidera play grounds, Bukungu landing site, and Bukungu primary school where more than 1000 people were reached with services, also at the main event MJAP exhibited the QR technology scanning innovation which is used to link people to care and gathers their data after receiving the HIV self-testing kits from the MJAP team.

Story by Geofrey Kasumba

Communication and Knowledge Management Specialist.

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