Claudine Housen, Staff Reporter

WESTERN BUREAU:

Persons living with HIV (PLWH) need to make a greater effort to practise safer sex, according to Dr. Kevin Harvey, coordinator for treatment, care and support in the Ministry of Health's HIV/AIDS unit. He says despite the efforts of Government to encourage safe-sex practices through its HIV prevention programme, there continues to be cases of female PLWHs wilfully getting pregnant after being diagnosed.

"For the past five years we have had a prevention programme and what we are finding is that some of the (HIV positive women) are having repeat pregnancies," he said. "For example (they) come to the clinic, get medication for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission, participate in the programme, have their baby, the baby is OK and then in another year or two they come back pregnant again and in a number of cases the baby is for a different father."

Added he: "We have even had persons in the programme pregnant for the third time being HIV positive and this suggests that some of them might not be using condoms and practising responsible sexual behaviour."

According to a study published in the 2004 West Indian Journalentitled: 'An assessment of mother-to-child HIV transmission prevention in 16 pilot antenatal clinics in Jamaica,' about 30 per cent of the pregnant women who attended the clinic pregnant knew that they were HIV positive one to two years before getting pregnant.

This is further acknowledged in the Ministry of Health's HIV/AIDS update for the period between January and June of 2005, which indicates that 15 pregnant women out of every 1,000 are infected with HIV, up from 13 persons per 1,000 of the previous year.

But according to Dr. Harvey, women are not the only ones putting themselves and their partners at risk.

"The men too are having unprotected sex because we are having more newly-diagnosed women here so the HIV positive men are also having unprotected sex, some of whom know their status at the time, and that is the issue," he said.

Dr. Harvey said that while it was understandable that with anti-retroviral drugs, PLWHs would feel healthy and want to have sex, some of them, because they feel well, have become lax in their safe-sex practices.

"Most people will change, but becoming HIV positive does not automatically result in a behaviour change in terms of risky sexual activity," he said. "It is natural for them to want to have sex because that is a natural part of life and they are no different from and you and I, (but) they have to keep in mind too that one of the reasons they would have contracted HIV in the first place is because of risky sexual behaviour."

HIV couples

Another area of concern is that of sexual relations between couples who both have a HIV positive status. Dr. Harvey suggested that perhaps because the programmes place a great emphasis on protection to prevent infection, persons who are already infected tend to think they do not need to use a condom if their partner is HIV positive, leaving themselves open to contracting the disease a second time.

"Even if you are having sex with a partner who is known to be positive, you need to have protective sex at all times," he said. "The strain of HIV you have may be different from the strain of HIV that your partner has and you can re-infect each other making your illness worse. This is because the medication that you are on may be working for the strain that you have but you may acquire a strain that is resistant to the that medication and thus make you ill, and you know if the medication does not work for you then and you will die.

"Sexual behaviour is not just to protect the other person that you are having sex with but is protecting yourself as well," he continued. "What we are saying is that if you are HIV positive, you need to practise safe-sex behaviour; that is, using a condom every time ... there are many different strains so once you have HIV that is not the end all and be all; you can catch it again so you need to protect yourself."