December 1 is the World AIDS Day and UNAIDS’ Michel Sidibé in a message commemorated World AIDS Day— “we stand in solidarity with the 78 million people who have become infected with HIV and remember the 35 million who have died from AIDS-related illnesses since the first cases of HIV were reported,” he said in the message.
Authorities here in Tehran believe the virus had been contaminated more people they say had been unable for various reasons to detect and to address in preventive terms properly. With a culture of tabooing sexual matters and general social laconism and silence, sexual matters have been more and more pushed to the darker social venues, where there is no place for transparency, out of the fear of social ostracism and marginalization.
The culture has contributed to Iran’s place in the world in terms of how HIV provides challenges to the health authorities and the public at large. The health system has accepted dangerous and licentious behavior contributes to the spread of the disease. Such an official is Parvin Kazerouni, Head of Health Ministry AIDS Control Office. She believes that statistics are indicative of the lurking threat; “up to June 2016, the official figures show that 32,670 individuals are HIV positive, with men contributing to 84 per cent of the figure and women, 16 per cent. Addiction is the major factor where addicts use shared syringes for injection with 68.2 per cent of the cases. Sexual affairs contributes to 18.5 per cent of the spread and only 1.5 per cent of cases were from mother to child during pregnancy,” she detailed.
Still in a related story Hassan Hashemi, Minister of Health believes control practices and approaches would not rule out the problem; “the threat is real and lurking around and we recommend the youth and sexually active cohort to take necessary measures against the disease; the health network uses up-to-date practices and measures, providing training on how to prevent the transfer of the virus; Iran is one of the most successful countries in the region in AIDS control,” said the minister, “we predict the real figure far exceeds the present statistics, since many of the patients would not divulge the painful reality of their being an HIV positive individual, and thus remain unaccounted.”
Shirin Ahmadnia, head of State Welfare Organization (SWO) Department of Prevention of Social Vulnerabilities believes with more than 11 million people in ages of marriage, a fact that, combined with hard economic times and weak prospects of establishing families, “are subject to deviations in their sexual confrontations; this is a high-risk behavior which threatens spread of AIDS still to others unaffected,” she said.
Mohammad Hadi Ayazi, Deputy-Health Minister for Social Affairs believes unofficial figures are far more than the officially announced to the media; “about 100,000 AIDS patients, with 70,000 still unaware that they are HIV positive,” his words come alarming. Ali Akbar Pourfathollah of Iranian Blood Transfusion Organization (IBTO) also criticizes the mentality and the general approach to the very fact of AIDS, which saw the issue as a social taboo, which contributed to the fact that only tip of the HIV iceberg becomes evident; “this mentality should be reviewed in favor of more real approaches to the disease which would help more transparency and detection of unnoticed cases where individuals do not inform the authorities of their HIV status,” he objected.
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