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Jakarta Post

HIV/AIDS prevention should also focus on men, not just sex workers: Djarot

Irawaty Wardany (The Jakarta Post)
Jakarta
Wed, September 20, 2017

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HIV/AIDS prevention should also focus on men, not just sex workers: Djarot Activists stage a peaceful rally to call for greater effort to tackle the spread of HIV/AIDS. (Tempo/Aditia Noviansyah.)

J

akarta Governor Djarot Saiful Hidayat has called on the Jakarta branch of the National Aids Commission (KPAP) to focus on both men and women with HIV/AIDS.

“It’s not right to just focus on women. Nowadays, men with HIV/AIDS are almost as many as women with HIV/AIDS,” he told a KPAP strategic planning event on Wednesday.

Last year, the KPAP revealed that the number of people living with AIDS in Jakarta had reached 8,656, an increase of 563 compared to 8,093 recorded in 2015.

However, this is just the tip of the iceberg because many people living with HIV/AIDS are reluctant to open up about their condition, and hence health officials do not have precise data on the scale of the problem, he said.

He went on to say that so far, HIV/AIDS prevention had placed too much weight on commercial sex workers and too little on the consumers, or the men who visit prostitutes.

“So please focus on men as well,” he said. (ecn)

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