I was afforded the unique opportunity of being one of the 20 or so delegates from Zambia to the International HIV Counseling and Testing Workshop in January 2008. It took place from the 22nd through the 24th and was a great experience. In order to address the challenges of lack of access to counseling and testing services in developing countries, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) sponsored the International HIV Counseling and Testing (CT) Workshop in Lusaka, Zambia from January 21–24, 2008. The meeting was supported by Population Services International, Family Health International, and the PEPFAR CT Technical Working Group. 177 delegates from 27 countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean attended the workshop which included over 50 technical presentations, visits to 10 CT sites in Lusaka, and 5 working group sessions.
Here is a picture of my technical working group at the conference.
They've created a website with an overview of all the topics covered and powerpoints of presentations.
http://www.psi.org/ct%2Dworkshop/
Family Planning Challenges in Zambia
On or around January 29th, Zambia’s Minister of Health made a statement in response to a lab technician deciding to test Depo Provera with an HIV test, and upon the control band and test band reading reactive, warned the Depo Provera may contain HIV. Then, unfortunately, the Minister of Health said Depo Provera has been completely withdrawn and quarantined pending completion of scientific investigations. They then ran the test on a PCR machine, Polymerase Chain Reaction, and I don’t think they found HIV. Later he said something like, it can still be used, but it had been so stigmatized by such shady info being in the media that many women who may have used it as a form of birth control have since ceased.
As we all may know, HIV stands for Human Immuno-deficiency Virus, which means it can only live in the Human body, so to even consider it hiding out in Depo Provera is absurd. Many women in Zambia are not in the position to negotiate condom use in their marriages as a form of birth control. Fortunately, as an injection, Depo can be discreetly used as birth control by a woman without her husband’s consent and therefore help her not to have any more babies that she would have to struggle even more to feed.
This entire mishap has been devastating to all the family planning organizations and health professionals who have been trying to promote this and get people comfortable with it. I can only hope that we can soon find a way to ease people’s minds.
Training as a counselor in HIV testing
As you all may or may not know, my third year extension has been focused on me supporting a counseling and testing program at an NGO consortium in Zambia called RAPIDS (Reaching HIV Affected People with Integrated Development and Support). I have worked on designing a strategy for implementing this counseling and testing (CT) program country-wide through the NGOs in our consortium. I have done all this without official training as a counselor in HIV or in the finger-prick method for RAPID testing.
Last week RAPIDS sponsored me to participate in a Training of Trainers for RAPID Testing. There we learned the methods of quality control, quality assurance, Zambia’s National Testing Algorithm (The combination and order of specific tests used in a given strategy), and most importantly how to prick someone’s finger and draw enough blood to use as a specimen for an HIV RAPID test. It may sound easy, but it is not, and there is a lot that goes into measuring the blood, reading the results, testing in the right order. It was a great training, I learned a lot. And next week I’ll be training in Psycho-social counseling which is needed for the pre and post counseling for HIV testing. It is a great for my own personal career development, and it will give me more insight to do my work at RAPIDS even more effectively. I’m very excited aboutthis opportunity.
We did our practical at the University Teaching Hospital of Zambia.
Here are some photos from the first training…
Do I look like a Doctor in my lab coat??
Dr. Jubra Muyanga was our Master Trainer one of the key people involved in the development of the National HIV Testing Algorithm and Training Curriculum.
