Several clinicians are opting for public health courses and jobs to avoid bedside healthcare practice.

This is as a result of the HIV epidemic in the country among others. The HIV/AIDS Consultant for Care International Dr. Samuel Duh who said this at a Workshop in Accra last Wednesday also attributed the problem to stigmatization and unfounded fears.

“There are doctors and nurses who wouldn’t touch an AIDS patients partly because of the HIV scare,” he said adding ” This is why they are moving into public health where they will not touch a patient.”

According to Dr. Duh, most people are of the view that HIV/AIDS patients do not need attention and care since they are going to die anyway.

He explained that HIV is just like other diseases such as Hypertension and Asthma, which have no cure but are managed well by health professionals. “Almost all diseases are as a result of human activities,” he said stressing even the mosquitoes, which cause malaria breed in insanitary conditions, which are as a result of human action.

He therefore called on Ghanaians to accord HIV/AIDS patients the assistance that they need in order to avoid the spread of the disease.

Dr. Duh is not the only health professional that has complained about discrimination of HIV patients by fellow health professionals.

At a visit to Agormanya in the Eastern Region sometime back, a Health Official of the St. Martins Hospital Dr. Richard Noamesi Amenyah said discrimination nearly marred the Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT ) programme of the Hospital. “People could hardly walked in here two years ago to do voluntary testing but these days, it is a common phenomena,” he said.

He attributed the stigma in the past, which he said is still pervasive to the community and health workers.

“When people were brought in with Tuberculosis and other opportunistic infections and were coughing, it was difficult for some nurses to even get closer to them,” Dr. Amenyah said with counseling, the stigma in the health sector has been reduced considerably.

The Coordinator in Charge of the Eastern Region National AIDS Control Programme Dr. Sampson Ofori said Stigmatisation and discrimination has contributed in no small way to the spread of the infection.

Dr. Ofori said out of fear of pricking themselves accidentally while taking a sample of blood from HIV patients, some health workers do not put in their best efforts. According to him, it is wrong for some doctors to insist on doing HIV tests before operating on patients.

Another area where HIV/AIDS patients are discriminated against is in the area of insurance.

Families of people who died of HIV related diseases and have life insurance policy will not want HIV to be written on the death certificate since insurance companies would not pay the family anything.

He said although UN migration laws says no country should ask for HIV tests before issuing out Visas to their countries, the United States insist that people who win the US visa lottery under go HIV test before a Visa is granted. He said it is also wrong for churches to also insist on HIV tests before allowing a couple to marry.

HIV was first found among intravenous drug users and Homosexuals in the Americas and has killed people in sub-Saharan Africa due to poverty than any other part of the world. Out of the 42 million people living with HIV worldwide, about 29 million are said to live in Sub-Saharan Africa. North America has 940, 000 patients while Western Europe has 560,000 patients. Eastern Europe has one million with North Africa and the Middle East recording 440. Latin America has 1.4 million cases while Australia and New Zealand has 15,000 cases. In addition, South and South-East Asia has recorded 6.1 million with the East Asia and Pacific recording one million.

In Ghana, the prevalence rate is about 3.4 percent according to the Ministry of Health’s Sentinel survey.

Experts say a lot of Work has been done on awareness creation to the detriment of behavioural change, care and support for people living with AIDS. Dr. Duh said to effect behavioural change there is the need for messages to be understood, to be convincing and repeated several times. “Awareness creation is a means of effecting behavioural change but we should go beyond that,” he said.

The workshop was organized by Care International, an NGO in collaboration with the Ghana Journalists Association and sponsored by The Hope for African Children Initiative, (HACI).