People may have limited awareness about how functional the Church is to society, and it may surprise them that such a faith-based center may actually be a good avenue for people to acquire HIV testing and subsequently receive proper treatments.
HealthDay reported that the majority of pregnant women and children with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa - about 87 percent and 90 percent respectively - according to the records of UNAIDS. Most of them in that population were given less supervision as others live in remote areas. In addition, one-third of HIV-infected women worldwide do not start treatment during pregnancy, despite the simple and inexpensive treatments available. All of these, in effect, resulted to about 210,000 new cases of HIV infection in children each year.
Interestingly, researchers found that after offering monthly church-based medical centers as part of the program called the Healthy Beginning Initiative, they noted 11 times increase in the number of patients running for tests as compared to when they had HIV testing only at their local health facilities.
"Most pregnant women in sub-Saharan Africa access HIV screening through the health care system," says study author Dr. Echezona Ezeanolue, associate professor in the School of Medicine and Community Health Sciences of the University of Nevada, as quoted in Medical Xpress.
"In many countries like Nigeria, only a third of deliveries take place in hospitals and less than three percent of health care facilities have established services for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission."
Thus, the research team looked for new means through which they can reach out to pregnant women who are at high risk of HIV, and reduce transmission of HIV to children. They focused on using the Church as a new primary location since it is where they can effectively elevate the number of pregnant women acquiring tests for HIV.
With this finding, it needs the current program(s) to extend such strategies from HIV testing to long term adherence and retention of all suspected women, as suggested by Dr. Benjamin Chi and Dr. Elizabeth Stringer from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. This is very important since they aimed at effectively eliminating pediatric HIV in the region and all over the world.
The study was published in The Lancnet Global Health.
