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Bassem Magdy-Cairo
In Egypt, 16,000 people living with HIV are offered free treatment by the state, but they also face false beliefs in society.
The World Health Organization (WHO) held a celebration of World AIDS Day on Tuesday, 1 December, in cooperation with UNAIDS and the Egyptian Ministry of Health, under the slogan "Watch, examine, support your camp".
Dr. Ahmed Khamis, Director of the Joint United Nations Program on AIDS, said during the celebration that Egypt is one of the countries with low rates of AIDS in all population groups, with a concentrated pandemic. in some categories more vulnerable to infection, stressing that his country wanted to eliminate AIDS by 2030.
In an exclusive statement to Al-Jazeera Net, Khamis said that there were about 16,000 people living with HIV in Egypt at the end of 2017, an approximate figure since the actual number can not be known because there are has people who are not aware of HIV infection.
He added that the Egyptian Ministry of Health was counting the number of people living with HIV who tested in their central lab that they were HIV-positive and was waiting for new figures on people living with AIDS to be published in the beginning. next year.
Yasser (a pseudonym) – a patient who discovered an HIV infection during a minor surgery in a public hospital – said that for some unexplainable reason, the hospital's administration had decided to send the test results to his employer. Yasser refused to raise a case to demand the return to work, for fear of spreading the news of his injury.
Yasser has been in treatment for three years and has no health problems. And confirms in her talk to Island Net that "as long as your health is healthy when you learn about your injury and that it is organized into treatment, you will stay healthy"
.
Exit treatment
According to Yasir, 30, the virus is treated monthly by the Ministry of Health's free diet hospital, the only one in Egypt to provide this kind of treatment: those who refuse to take treatment should find a way to To buy a treatment abroad.
Yasir receives two types of medications – Truvada and Efavirenz – in a psychiatric hospital of the Ministry of Health. These hospitals do not have modern medicines combining three drugs into a single tablet like Atripla.
In his speech to Al Jazeera Net, Dr. Khamis said that the drugs offered in Egypt were very good and adhered to the universal treatment protocol, in accordance with the recommendations of the World Health Organization, and that they contained the same substances as those used abroad, imported free of charge by the Ministry of Health for people living with HIV. He pointed out that new drugs are not offered in Egypt until now.
The treatment is currently based on medical tests that the carrier of the virus is supposed to do every six months, in accordance with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) to ensure that the virus contains little blood and that the number of immune cells is high.
These tests are sometimes not available in Ministry of Health hospitals and often result in delayed results. Some resorted to private investigators. These tests are expensive or unavailable and the patient has to reveal his illness.
According to Hossam (a pseudonym) – one of the people infected with the virus and activists awareness campaigns – he notes a significant increase in the number of cases of detection of the disease.
Hossam, 25, said that in the past, the patient was not known to have been infected unless he was screened for the virus while traveling in a Gulf country, or to suffer from pain. 39 a strange disease or opportunistic disease accompanying the deterioration of the immune system. Now some at-risk groups are now accepting HIV testing.
L & # 39; ignorance
In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera Net, Dr. Ihab Al-Kharrat, psychiatrist and director of one of the special treatment centers for drug addicts and one of the most prominent advocates for the rights of people with AIDS, explained that HIV is transmitted only through sexual intercourse, blood transfusion or breast milk. Pregnant virus and healthy person.
According to Kharrat, there is a lot of ignorance and misconceptions about AIDS, which even some Egyptian doctors might think.
He pointed out that doctors should take precautionary measures when they treat patients during any surgical procedure, and carry out viral tests for them anyway.
Dr. Ahmed Ali Aljazeera.net said that he was not afraid to deal with carriers of the virus, which is known for its transmission. He takes precautionary measures and understands the anxiety of his fellow doctors when he deals with them because it is an incurable disease.
According to Khamis, doctors have reacted strongly to AIDS, with the Ministry of Health trying to spread the correct information among doctors about HIV transmission.
He confirmed that the standard infection control procedures in all Ministry of Health hospitals protect the doctor by providing a "post-exposure preventive treatment" under which the doctor suspected of having been exposed to the virus must receive preventive treatment within 72 hours.
Dr. Ahmed Abdel Halim, a doctor at the Ministry of Health, does not agree with his Facebook page, which was stabbed with a needle from an HIV-positive patient during a surgical intervention. He stated that he had received post-exposure prophylaxis so that he could administer a preventive dose. From a hospital for diets.
In his summary of his experience, Abdul Halim told doctors that AIDS patients were very numerous and that the Ministry of Health would not protect them. "He will treat you." He advised them to protect themselves because nobody could benefit if they were infected, he said.
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