HIV/AIDS: NGO discharges 307 negative infants

Within the past one year, the AIDS Health Care Foundation (AHF) has discharged a total of 307 HIV/ AIDS exposed infants from its comprehensive facilities in Benue State. The children were certified negative.

The state nursing coordinator of the AHF, Ruth Atabor, made the disclosure in an interview with journalists in Makurdi.

“We have discharged 307 HIV exposed infants from our comprehensive sites in seven local government areas in Benue,” she said.

Atabor said her unit under the AHF worked with mothers to improve antenatal care in the state by also linking pregnant women who tested positive to HIV to the prevention from mother to child transmission (PMTCT) programmes of the organisation’s comprehensive sites in the local government areas for care.

Earlier, the AHF-Nigeria Advocacy/Marketing manager, Steve Aborisade, said the choice of celebrating the mentor mothers was a decision taken by the organisation to honour them among other women leaders in all its intervention programme in the state.

Aborishade noted that because of the mentor mothers, “We are having children who are HIV negative, and that’s because of the work they do. It is because of their work that more women are attending antenatal while HIV positive mothers are having children who are not positive.”

Also speaking, two of the mentor mothers, Sonia Vende and Deborah Hwande, who worked in Guma and Makurdi facilities respectively, identified malnutrition, lack of resources and access to health facility as the major challenges facing the rural pregnant women and their infants, stressing that the AHF has helped them to bridge the gap.