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Message of the Minister of Health with the occasion of the World Aids Day.Monday 1st December 2003
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MESSAGE OF THE MINISTER OF HEALTH
WITH THE OCCASION OF WORLD AIDS DAY
Monday 1st December 2003
This year, as in 2002, World AIDS Day is dedicated to combating stigma and discrimination against people with HIV. The choice is by no means fortuitous. Humankind faces daily this multifaceted and extensive phenomenon which corrodes its soul and body, as it extents its tentacles like the Lernean Hydra in homes and families, workplaces, schools, health institutions, social services. Indifference leads to ignorance, fear for the unknown finds support in power relations so as to confine, exclude, ostracize our fellow people who need us and to lead them to isolation and despair.
It is not AIDS alone that kills. Prejudice is equally ruthless because it kills the spirit, in the same way as AIDS kills the soul. The more than 40 million people with AIDS living today worldwide, the 10 new infections taking place every minute, the hecatombs of dead people who have surpassed 22 million, the biblical disasters the pandemic has brought upon the economies and social structures of developing countries provide painful testimony to this tragic reality.
Isolation, fear, shame, loss of self-esteem cause the affected individuals to hide from other people’s judgment and deprive them of the motives to stand up for a life of dignity, treatment becoming a human being, social support and medical care. They intrude between the individual and his or her judgment and the will to take measures for self-protection and the protection of others, since this would lead to the revelation of a terrible reality.
Without doubt, stigma, prejudice and discrimination constitute a formidable foe, perhaps the most powerful weapon for the spread of the disease, mainly in societies who dwell under the spell of fear and uncertainty. Based on the principle that the fight against AIDS passes through the fight against prejudice, this year’s World AIDS Day aims to sensitize and urge people and governments to strike at the root of the problem taking all necessary measures in order to ban it from our lives and from the social structures and services of their countries.
Social support and treatment of people with HIV-infection and their families constitute a policy of the highest priority for the Ministry of Health and for the National AIDS Programme. Part of this policy has been the provision of free counselling, testing and clinical care since the first years of the epidemic. More than half a million pounds are spent in Cyprus each year on antriretroviral therapies. Huge amounts are also spent for the treatment of opportunistic infections and cancers and for the provision of psychological and social support to people with HIV and AIDS. In the area of prevention, the results have also been positive since, 17 years after the first cases were reported in Cyprus, the level of HIV-infection still remains very low.
We are currently at a turning point where the danger of a spread of the epidemic is visible, because of risky sexual practices and the increasing use of drugs. The incidents of phobia, prejudice and discrimination, though limited and less marked than in the past, are still there and constitute a serious obstacle to the efforts to inform and to protect the public, since the people themselves who have been affected remain at the margin of society, with no active role in our common endeavours to fight the epidemic.
These concerns and the resolution for a more dynamic approach to the situation are at the basis of the preparation by the Ministry of Health of the new five-year strategic plan against AIDS. The essential element of this plan is the reinforcement of all basic strategies for prevention, care, social support and the efficient operation of the National AIDS Programme.
In a press conference that will be held with the occasion of this year’s campaign against AIDS on Friday 12 December 2003, at 10.30 am at the Amphitheatre of the Public Information Office, the Minister of Health will announce the preparation of the plan. She will take this opportunity to call on all individuals, services and social partners dealing with AIDS to work together for the implementation of the aims of the strategic plan for the confinement of the epidemic and for a compassionate approach towards people who have had the misfortune to become infected with the virus.
Let us all today make the logo:
Live and let live
a way of living and a daily practice and let us work together to rid our country, Cyprus, of prejudice and of AIDS.
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