BELIZE CITY, Mon. Mar. 14, 2022– Since the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) had been discovered back in the 1980s, 79.3 million persons have been infected with the virus, and 36.3 million people have died of the disease.
The virus is known to be undetectable within a person’s body for months or even years and can be transmitted via unprotected sex with an infected person or other forms of exchange of bodily fluids.
In an ongoing effort to combat the spread of HIV, the National AIDS Commission (NAC) launched the initial phase of its HIV Self-test Pilot Project on Tuesday, March 8. The. NAC pilot project is supported through the Caribbean Med Lab Foundation under the PANCAP-CVC-COIN Multi-Country Regional Grant, of which Belize is a beneficiary.
NAC has acquired 50 OraQuick self-test kits, which provide an alternative to blood tests for the detection of HIV antibodies. Conducting a self-test can be done by collecting saliva from one’s mouth, applying the test to the saliva, and receiving the result privately in the comfort of one’s home.
Enrique Romero, Executive Director for the National AIDS Commission, said that the HIV self-testing kit is close to 100 percent accurate, with 99% accuracy, and has been approved by the World Health Organization (WHO). Romero further stated that the self-testing during the initial phase of the project will be done at the Belize Family Life Association and Civil Society Organization Hub to validate the self-test accuracy and to welcome persons who wouldn’t go to a clinic to get tested for HIV.
“ … We’re doing it at a facility base for several reasons. The pilot will not only allow us to get persons that would not normally go to a clinic to get a test, but it will also allow us to validate [the accuracy]. So, when I go to the facility for example, and they give me the test kit—I open it and they give the instructions on how to do it; I swab my mouth, I wait, I look at the result, and the facility will do two HIV rapid test on me to validate. So, if the rapid test is saying negative, we are expecting the other two will also be negative. You can also be referred to the laboratory for confirmation through bloodwork. That’s the final test that is done to confirm,” Romero explained.
He further pointed out, “The pilot phase is used for us to validate the accuracy of the OraQuick HIV self-test. It’s similar to the COVID test, where people have stated that they did a rapid test, and it’s negative but they have symptoms, and they went to do a PCR test then the PCR shows that yes they have COVID.”
Romero mentioned that in 2020, there were 193 persons newly infected with HIV, and the majority of those persons were young adults with ages ranging from 20 to 39.
“Ages 20 to 24, 29 new infections; ages 25 to 29, 30 new infections; ages 30 to 34, 25 new infections. So, those three brackets there [is] the cream of our population. That’s the youth of our population. That’s when people are in their prime in terms of productive years of work in society, so it’s alarming that our young people are the ones that are being infected. We know that young people are in the prime of their lives; they want to experience, they have multiple partners, 2, 3 girlfriends and so forth; these are the [people] we want to reach to,” said Romero.
According to WHO, an estimated 37.7 million individuals were living with HIV globally at the end of 2020. An estimated 5,500 persons are living with HIV in Belize, and close to 2,800 persons know their HIV status.
“We have heard stories from persons who go to health facilities, and they’re treated badly … so people say, ‘I don’t want to go to that facility because they treat me bad, they treat me different,’ so all these are barriers that prohibit people from accessing services … a person that has HIV/AIDS is ten times more likely to die from tuberculous than from AIDS itself because what the AIDS disease does is it impairs your immune system, it weakens it just like COVID, and when your immune system is weak then you have what is called opportunistic infections; you can get bronchitis, you can get tuberculous and those things are the ones that will kill you easier than the AIDS disease itself,” explained Romero.