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ABCs of Preventing HIV and AIDS Among Youths
Thursday, July 11, 2002
My name is Dr. Paul De Lay. I'm the senior advisor on AIDS for the U.S. Agency for International Development. Today is the fourth and final press briefing that we organized for this conference.
And today we want to discuss a newly developing success story in Zambia, a country that has been one of the hardest-hit in the AIDS pandemic, where over 20% of the adult population is HIV-infected. Let me tell you a little bit more about the context. One out of every six urban youth, aged 15 to 19, is HIV-infected. By the age of 13, 37% of boys and 27% of girls have had sex. Among 15 to 19-year-olds, 62% of boys and 59% of girls have had sex.
In this context, the government of Zambia launched a series of campaigns directed at youth, and one of these is the HEART project that we're going to be hearing about today -- Helping Each other Act Responsibly Together. Let me put this in further context. In the past five years, HIV infections in the 15 to 19-year-old urban girls population have dropped nearly 50%, from 28% to 15%. This is a remarkable accomplishment, and it's echoing Uganda's success story, where, very similar, we see young age cohorts, particularly girls, being the first signal that the epidemic is turning around.
How did this happen? What changes in behavior led to this decline? Well, reducing infections through sexual transmission in youth involves three basic strategies, what we call the ABCs. "A" for abstinence, "B" for be faithful, and "C" for condoms. This is not a new concept. However, over the past five years, we've gained a better understanding of the delicate balance between these three strategies. In some communities, the delay of sexual debut is key to reversing the epidemic. In other communities -- for example, where young people marry early -- faithfulness is the critical strategy. Today's discussion demonstrates how a program designed by youth, for youth, using mass media, can dramatically reduce premarital sex among single women from 41% in the early '90s to 14% in the late 1990s. In addition to this delay of sexual debut, other participants in this program used condoms during their last sexual act nearly twice as often as those youth who were not participating in this program. These persons tended to be older and tended to be women.
We have three speakers today, and they will describe how this campaign achieved such dramatic results. The first is Dr. Jane Bertrand, who's the Director at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Communication Programs. To her left is Holo Hachonda, from the Youth Action Organization, youth communications coordinator - Youth Activist Organization. And we'll be joined by Maureen Mwanawasa, the first lady of Zambia.
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