The nexus between birth control and combating HIV/AIDS

Convincing women in the deeply impoverished Rwandan countryside on having fewer children is a daunting task. Apparently, children bring these families prestige. For them, children are God sent. So it’s difficult, very difficult to convince them against having more. After the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi, it seemed difficult to believe that overpopulation would ever be a problem. Yet Rwanda has long had more people than its meagre resources and small area can support. In 2007, Rwanda decided to sensitise her people on the importance of having a small manageable family. Officials in Rwanda within that year planned to unveil a campaign promoting contraception and family planning to control the country’s population growth and stabilize its economy. However, in the quest to deal with issues of population control, family health care matters have taken another dimension, a result of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Rwanda has thus run a dual campaign of population control and HIV/AIDS awareness. What other methods of birth control are there apart from the use contraceptives which include condoms? That is the question running through my mind right now?Actually I have no answer to this but I have to talk about this observation I made last week. In this time and era where the youth are very sexually active, it got me wondering whether people really practice safe sex. In the last two weeks, there have been no condoms in the shelves at Nakumatt supermarket, am not sure whether the product is out of stock in Simba supermarket as well or actually they do not sell it at all. Once you decide to be sexually active and you are not ready to have a baby, you need to choose a method of birth control. Now that there are several side effects for every birth control methods, many young people opt for the use of condoms. Maria Mutesi found herself in hot soup the same week, she says. Condoms were out of stock and the following morning there were no emergency pills in any pharmacy in town. In such a case, are the youth really keen in preventing the spread of HIV/ AIDS? The extent of the AIDS crisis is very clear in many African countries, as increasing numbers of people succumb to HIV. According to Avert, an international Aids charity, in the absence of massively expanded prevention, treatment and care efforts, it is expected that the AIDS death toll in sub-Saharan Africa will continue to rise. This means that the impact of the AIDS epidemic on these societies will be felt most strongly in the course of the next ten years and beyond. Its social and economic consequences are already widely felt, not only in the health sector but also in education, industry, agriculture, transport, human resources and the economy in general. Many people are ashamed of talking about these issues yet these are the very issues affecting us in our daily lives. If peers cannot discuss these issues amongst among themselves, how much harder is it for parents to talk to their children about sex and HIV/AIDS? Although politicians and policymakers are increasingly committed to AIDS prevention and control efforts in countries such as Rwanda, a multidisciplinary approach such as; early identification and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases, promotion of condom usage, rapid blood screening to test for HIV in rural areas, public awareness campaigns, poverty eradication, and development of prevention interventions have to be considered for effective control of the spread of this virus in the Indian subcontinent. As long as people are thoroughly educated about the dangerous effects of unsafe sex, then there is not much to fear but now if there are no condoms in stores, there is every reason to be afraid. Population control and the fight against HIV/AIDS should be on everyone’s conscience. karuthum@gmail.com