HIV infection: Teenagers can’t prevent what they don’t know

I bumped into a friend who came off as a disturbed single mother of two treasured teenagers - a girl and a boy. After their daddy suddenly died when they were young, she vowed to put everything into their education and wellbeing.

Trouble started when mummy decided to tidy up daughter’s room. She landed on a pack of ‘partly consumed’ morning after or emergency pills labelled Postinor-2.

Panicking, she ventured into the son’s room and rummaged through his stuff, but found nothing to concretely satisfy her curiosity. But in one of the pockets of his jeans, was a faded receipt from a pharmacy which left her agitated because he has not been ill in ages.

Like it happens with many teenagers, the mum says he hangs out with ‘bad groups.’ She wanted ‘at least’ to find condoms to assure her that he was using protection!

A counsellor advised her to trick the children into taking an HIV test by claiming she was attempting to get them scholarships. (Luckily they are HIV negative and do not have sexually transmitted infections).

The counsellor found out before the test to mum’s dismay that the children had very little knowledge about HIV/Aids, its cause and how it is spread.

The daughter claimed that emergency pills stop HIV/Aids infection because they kill all the sperms that are released into the woman’s birth canal. With them, all diseases are neutralised as well.

The son added that they may be used in the place of condoms because condoms when over used may lead to impotence! This encounter reminds me of the long hilarious conversation I once had with a pharmacist who has been in the business for more than two decades.

He told me that these days, condoms do not sell that much as they used to in the last two decades. The clients say they do not wear, they go bare because of a drug called Truvada. Truvada is a drug used for Pre-Exposure Prohylaxis (PrEP) and usually one pill a day is recommended.

It acts as a preventive measure for healthy people who are at high risk of contracting HIV like doctors and nurses or care givers. It does not cure HIV/Aids though. He says this one is bought by all age groups, especially by ‘those celebs of yours!’ Sales usually go up at the start of the weekend meaning that people get ready for unprotected sex.

Sundays and the beginning of the week see young girls lining up for emergency pills like Postinor-2, meaning that they probably had unprotected sex over the weekend and do not want to get pregnant. But he says some men as well buy Postinor-2, implying that they are into unprotected sex, but do not want to father children in the process. Then there are the drugs that ‘keep the pharmacy going.’

These are aphrodisiacs like Horny Goat Weed, Viagra, Kamagura, Apcalih, M-energex, Manix, Levitra, etc, which are bought all week. They fly off the shelf as soon as they land there and they cost more than ordinary drugs, which make them profitable.

Men in their 50s, 60s and 70s are the greatest consumers. Some look too old, but are still active in the business. These ones also go with Truvada. Meaning they need to be ‘assisted’ to have unprotected sex. These trends are in contrast with the situation more than 20 years ago at the advent of the HIV/Aids epidemic.

Those days, you could just tell a person living with HIV/Aids on sight. They lost so much weight so the disease was called “slim”. They had oral thrush, herps also called kisipi on the neck and the abdomen, big black boils on the legs and arms, which many hid under long garments that covered the legs and arms.

Also, many lost all their hair as they battled the disease during a period where there were no drugs and people died very quickly soon after infection.

In those days, when one talked about HIV/Aids, there were visible examples in the community and people took it seriously because the disease quickly and harshly took one to their grave.

With the advent of Antiretroviral therapy (ART) people infected with HIV/Aids not only live longer, but also do not show many of the scary symptoms that we saw in the late 80s and early 90s.

And when they die, many times it is said they died of cancer or meningitis or some other ‘respectable’ ailment. Also because of this therapy, there is very little emphasis on prevention and awareness like we had back then.

Consequently, there are many young people who do not have adequate information about this grave disease and its prevention. They do not know the risk it poses to their lives. They simply rely on hearsay and other misleading information from their peers. Older infected sexual partners may take advantage of them because of this.

Now that the majority of our population are teenagers, we need to put a lot of emphasis on providing information about the cause and spread of the disease more than anything else. Young people can’t make informed choices if they are not informed and yet HIV/Aid is still around and incurable.

Nicholas Sengoba is a commentator on political
and social issues. [email protected]
Twitter:@nsengoba