Pasay City eyes stronger AIDS, HIV info drive

The Pasay City Health Office announced over the weekend that it would strengthen and continue to reinforce its awareness campaigns against the spread of   the dreaded human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (HIV-AIDS) to convince more residents to submit themselves to voluntary testing.

City health officer Dr. Joan Carlota Ranieses said that she and her personnel were having difficulty monitoring HIV-AIDS cases in Pasay because testing was not mandatory.

“What we do is help promote awareness of HIV-AIDS so that we can encourage the public to [undergo] the test especially those who are at risk [because of] their work,” Ranieses added.

Last month, Pasay was named by the Department of Health (DOH) as one of the six cities in the country most at risk for the spread of the disease.

Ranieses, however, noted that unlike the procedure in  HIV-AIDS cases, the city’s health workers regular conducted checkups for other sexually transmitted infections (STI).

Last week, Mayor Antonino Calixto stressed the need to amend Pasay’s AIDS Prevention and Control Ordinance “to strengthen the monitoring and implementation of the law.”

This was after he expressed alarm over the DOH report and asked the city council to go over the ordinance and provide additional funding for its strict implementation.

“We need to act and do more to strengthen our anti-AIDS campaign,” Calixto said in a statement.

The AIDS Prevention and Control Ordinance strictly requires all entertainers and other workers with similar occupations to attend an AIDS/STI Awareness Seminar before they are given a work license and an occupational health permit. They must also undergo an STI examination every two weeks in the city’s Social Hygiene Clinic.

In addition, the ordinance requires operators of entertainment establishments “to develop a set of their own health care policies and to present original copies of the birth certificates of all their applicants for employment and other pertinent documents duly authenticated by the City Health Office.”

Calixto, however, noted that all these measures were clearly not enough to stop the spread of HIV-AIDS. He stressed that education, information and communication would still be the best tools in the prevention and control of the virus.

“It is very important that everybody understands HIV-AIDS and carries out measures to prevent its spread,” he said.

According to Ranieses, the city health sector has taken note of the August report of the AIDS Registry of the Philippines which shows that nine out of 10 people are getting infected daily.

“We are gearing up for the cases of men having sex with men (MSM) because according to the report, 70 percent of AIDS-infected individuals are male. Every year, the increasing rate ranges from ages 17-25 and most of them are homosexual,” she said.

Last month, the DOH reported that the cities most at risk for the spread of the dreaded disease were Manila, Pasay, Quezon City, Cebu, Davao and Angeles City.