Latin America Needs HIV Test Available to Everyone, UNAIDS Ambassador Says Latin American Herald Tribune
go to original May 26, 2016

The First Lady of Panama, Lorena Castillo de Varela (UNAIDS)

Tests to detect HIV infection should be available to everyone in Latin America so patients can start antiretroviral therapy as early as possible, said the UNAIDS ambassador for the region and first lady of Panama, Lorena Castillo.

“The most serious aspect in the current situation is that we don’t know how many people are seropositive because they don’t get tested. Everyone should have access to free tests to determine their status,” Castillo said in an interview with EFE.

Castillo, who is attending the World Health Assembly in Geneva as ambassador from Latin America to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS, has become a spokeswoman for the UNAIDS “Zero Discrimination” campaign.

The difficulties in getting access to the diagnostic tests arise, in part, from lack of health clinics, particularly in poor areas, but also from the stigmatization of the disease and the high-risk populations it mostly affects, Castillo said.

Some 19 percent of HIV-positive women in Panama, according to the campaign, were pressured by a health-care professional to go through with sterilization, and 25 percent were advised not to have children.

The advice for women not to have children rose to 48 percent of seropositive women in Costa Rica; 42 percent in Colombia; 37 percent in Mexico; and 36 percent in Guatemala.

Read the rest at Latin American Herald Tribune

Related: Put to the Test: A Young Woman Talks Life with HIV (Jewish Journal)

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