Aids Commission boss blames rise in HIV in females on transactional sex, others

The Director-General of the Ghana AIDS Commission, Mr Steve Gyeremeh Atuahene, has attributed the recent prevalence in the HIV infections in the country among young people, women most especially to behavioral life style.

In an interview with  TV3 monitored by GhanaPlus.com, he said behavioral patterns such as transactional sex, prostitution, friends with benefit as well as sugar daddy, sugar mummy have been identified as the root cause of the recent rise of the disease among young people, most especially, women.

“Young people have adopted new behaviours apart from the Sugar Daddy- Sugar Mummy syndrome, we also have what we call friends-with-benefit, where they will have girlfriends, boyfriends and the idea, is that if you sleep with me you’ll have to give me money”,

“Majority of young women are into transactional sex; that is where they think that whenever they have sex with someone they should get something back, it can be money, it can be a gift, it can be any other thing in exchange for sex, they don’t see themselves as prostitutes but it is a practice that exposes them to HIV transmission,” he said.

He described as worrying the development and indicated the country would only make head way if there was a change in the behavior pattern.

“The other thing is that more and more women are exchanging sex for money on the streets, what we call sex work and that is also quite worrying”, Mr Gyeremeh Atuahene added.

HIV in Ghana

Ghana Aids Commissions figures has indicated that out of the approximately 30.8million population of Ghana 346,120 are HIV positive with 18,928 recorded in 2020 alone.

Out of the 18,928 new infections, adult age 25 and above constitute 9,796 representing 53% , young people age 15-24 constituted 5,211 representing 28% while children age 0-14 constitute 2,961 representing 19% .

The figures revealed that females recorded higher percentage of 83 percent as against 17% recorded by males.

Source: GhanaPlus.com