Health Cabinet Secretary warns over teen sex

Adolescents and youth are engaging in careless sex, curtailing efforts to scale down new HIV infections, the government warned Thursday.

Health Cabinet Secretary James Macharia, while raising the red flag, called for programmes aimed at providing both information and comprehensive reproductive health services for this vulnerable group.

Mr Macharia, who spoke at the Sixth Conference on Peer Education, Sexuality, HIV and Aids, cited the 14-to-25-year age group as a crucial link in the provision of reproductive health services.

However, he remained tight-lipped on whether the provision of condoms to adolescents and the youth was appropriate—a notion his Education counterpart Jacob Kaimenyi rejected in a newspaper report Thursday.

ZERO DISCRIMINATION

“The youth have become careless with their conduct, exposing themselves to HIV and Aids, yet they play a crucial role in the development of this country,” Mr Macharia said while opening the annual conference at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre Thursday.

With a third of new HIV infections occurring among young people below 24, the minister called for more emphasis on HIV prevention and management programmes among this group to avoid new infections.

Themed, ‘Zero Aids now! Miles and misses,’ the three-day conference has 600 delegates from various youth organisations and NGOs, and will discuss how to lead Kenya towards zero new infections, zero Aids-related deaths and zero discrimination.

Mr Stanley Ngara, a condom advocate based at Liverpool VCT called for the inclusion of adolescents and the youth in reproductive health talks and programmes.

Their questions should be answered with clarity and precision to discourage alternative sources of information that could mislead them.

“We are a unique society that does not want to talk about sex, yet teenagers are experimenting with it, the moment their parents are out of the door,” he said.

Mr Ngara asked parents and guardians to discuss sex issues with their adolescent children and youth.

Ugandan Youth Advocate Jackline Alesi termed the forceful sterilisation of women with HIV/Aids as a gross violation of human rights, denying them a chance to be women and human beings.

Mr Macharia challenged the youth to avoid contracting HIV from irresponsible sexual behaviours.

He called for integrated efforts to focus on funding projects on HIV/Aids pointing out that it was a collaborative effort than that of the Executive.

The Cabinet Secretary further discouraged the reliance on donor funding and called for creative and sustainable ways to reach the affected populations across multiple health campaigns, especially Non-Communicable Diseases.