National Aids Commission Celebrates World Aids Day

The National AIDS Commission celebrated World AIDS Day today in Belize City. Although the official date is December 1st, they held the event today since the first falls on a Sunday. This year’s theme is “Take the Rights Path.” We caught up with Enrique Romero, the Executive Director, to discuss some of their successes and the barriers that still exist in accessing services.

 

Enrique Romero, Executive Director, National Aids Commission

“World Aids Day is observed in December first every year and this year falls on a Sunday. So, we decided to observe it this year Friday under the theme “Take the Rights Path”, which focuses on human rights as a strategy, or as the need to make a significant dent on the HIV response. The Government of Belize has been providing medication free of cost now. Other commodities include condoms, lubricants and so forth. So, to end the HIV response will require strategies and innovative interventions that go beyond the biomedical approach. Evidence and data have shown that one of the key strategies to ending the epidemic is through a rights-based approach. In order to end aids, we need to eliminate all the barriers that prohibit persons from accessing services. In my presentation earlier I spoke about young men being affected by HIV and getting young men to access HIV services. Those are the things we need to ensure. In tandem with that we need to ensure we remove the barriers. For example, one of the critical barriers is the fact that young people consent to have sex at the age of sixteen, but they cannot access health service until they are eighteen. So that disparity creates a huge barrier.”