Rishard Khan
Underground sex parties and sex tourism in the Caribbean region need to be considered in the response plan for AIDS, according to the Permanent Secretary of the National AIDS Coordinating Committee Secretariat under the Ministry of Health, Ian Ramdahin.
His advice came during his keynote address at a joint regional dialogue among key stakeholders and partners, Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM) multi-country grant at Hyatt today.
"This is where I think the global response needs to focus on, the people. Because yes we have the key populations...but there is an underground, I put it, the sex parties (and) partygoers. They are not factored into the HIV/AIDS response," he said.
"We need to get to these people because even though we try to control and contain them, it's like the Caribbean is a destination of sex tourism. If we can't take that into recognition and design the controls then we'd continuously find ourselves in this position."
UNAIDS multi-country office director Dr Richard Amenyah encouraged the regional attendees on their collaborative planning efforts, which will be key to successfully address the region's AIDS epidemic.
"I hope that this meeting we are having here, in the next three days, we are going to synthesise all the critical issues that will help us to be able to address this issue once and for all in the Caribbean," he said.
"As I speak with you, we have 38 people getting infected every day in the Caribbean. This is too many, we can address this. We have over 16 people dying every day in the Caribbean. We can change this if we pool our efforts together. We have about 92,000 people in the Caribbean waiting to get on to treatment. We can make this possible if you and I collaborate."
He also warned that the world's AIDS response was in danger of losing ground gained over the last few years. According to the Global AIDS Report 2022, globally the number of new infections dropped by only 3.6 per cent between 2020 and 2021, the smallest annual decline in new HIV infections since 2016. However, while it found notable declines in new HIV infections in the Caribbean and western and central Africa, the HIV response is threatened by a tightening resource crunch.
