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The Director General of the national AIDS Secretariat (NAS), Abdul Rahman Sesay has in an exclusive interview revealed that the Pre-Exposure Prove lances (PREP) has been made available to commercial sex workers to prevent 99 percent chances of contracting disease.
He said PREP is designed as a daily medication to help reduce the spread of diseases to another sexual partner. Mr. Sesay furthered that PREP can be administered to sex workers and highly vulnerable people who had contracted sexually transmitted disease.
He said stated that the focus is on sex workers due to the nature of their job and their clients who do not even know their HIV status.
“PREP is like Anti-Retro Viral drugs (ARV) use for those with the infection and can only be administered to those meeting the criteria, and those with positive HIV status can take the drugs,” he clarified.
He said the prevention intervention is a step to curtail the spread of HIV/AIDS any further and explained that sexual workers are highly vulnerable and described others as key drivers of the epidemic such as men having sex with men, intervention of drugs transgender, and more.
To further curtail it spread the secretariat has mapped out ways in developing a module called differentiated Service delivery model to cater for all sorts of people with stable and unstable issues.
He said stable clients are those who adhere to medial service and who always take their drugs as prescribed – monthly or after every month. For those unstable clients, he said the secretariat has made provisions for the drugs to be as closer to their doorstep as possible. The director explained that they are focusing on female sex workers because they come mostly in contact with clients who sometimes reject the use of condom and opt to pay more money, while those who use condoms are limited and ono pay much.
The director said die to such findings, they institute such measure to them, especially to HIV positive people to be safer with or without the use of condom with clients.
He disclosed to this medium that very soon they will carter for homosexual to help protect them from HIV, while the process will spread to promiscuous married couples.
A-Z Newspaper reports that, according to records, Sierra Leone is on the prevalent rate with 1.7% HIV positive cases, while the estimated Sierra Leonean with the virus is amounts to 80,000.
