Government to promote condoms in villages

The Ugandan government is soon to start distributing free condoms in villages countrywide as part of its struggle against the HIV/AIDS pandemic and "unwanted pregnancies", according to a senior health official. Dr Elizabeth Madraa, who heads Uganda's AIDS Control Programme, said on Wednesday that the ministry was already mobilising volunteers at the village level to help carry out the distribution of condoms. "We already have a structure of condom distribution in Uganda, but that is only in urban areas. If we want to promote condom use throughout Uganda, we must make sure they are also available at the village level," she told IRIN. Madraa said the village volunteers would be trained on the storage, use and disposal of condoms, as well as on innovative means of distributing them widely - at funeral rites, wedding parties and other celebrations. However, Dr Donkoungou Boukare, the medical coordinator of Medecins Sans Frontieres-France, which runs HIV/AIDS programmes in the northern district of Arua, told IRIN he had doubts that Ugandan village populations would be receptive to using condoms. "It is really political. I don't think people in the village bother to use condoms," he said. "But generally, in Uganda, they try everything - and that is why there has been some success," he told IRIN from the capital, Kampala. Uganda has been cited as the success story in Sub-Saharan Africa in its effort to reduce HIV-prevalence levels, according to the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS, UNAIDS, which noted a decline in the numbers of HIV-positive women attending antenatal clinics through the 1980s and 1990s, at clinics for sexually transmitted diseases for both men and women, and among young people. Nonetheless, of a population of about 21 million, 820,000 people (including over 470,000 women and children) are estimated to be living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 1999, according to UNAIDS latest statistics. The adult rate of infection then stood at 8.3 percent, it said. During 1999, about 11,000 Ugandans died from the disease, and there were almost one million children under 15 years of age who had lost their mother or both parents to AIDS at the end of that year, it stated. UNAIDS country information on Uganda at www.unaids.org/hivaidsinfo/statistics/fact_sheets/pdfs/Uganda_en.pdf General HIV/AIDS prevalence has been going down in Uganda, but the infection rate varies from one district to another, as well as between population segments, according to Boukare. The prevalence rate among pregnant mothers, for example, had gone down to between 6 percent and 10 percent, from between 15 percent and 20 percent in the previous decade, he said. Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni in September last year received an award from UNAIDS for his "distinguished leadership excellence" in the fight against the epidemic in Uganda.