'30 died of HIV infection in Tripura in 2014-15'

Altogether 30 people died of HIV infection in Tripura in 2014-15, officials said today.
The number of deaths in the financial current year till September is 10, Ashok Roy, AIDS Control Society's Project Director of Tripura state, said.
The state has registered over 950 HIV positive cases in two years. Of them, 700 visit hospital every month to receive anti-retroviral therapy and 250 HIV positive patients meet doctors for consultation and to get medicines.
This increase in HIV testing uptake worldwide has led to
more than 80 per cent of all people diagnosed with HIV receiving the ART, the WHO release said.

HIV testing coverage remains low among various population groups. For example, global coverage rates for all HIV testing, prevention and treatment are lower among men than women.

Men account for only 30 per cent of people who have tested for HIV. As a result men with HIV are less likely to be diagnosed and put on ART and are more likely to die of HIV- related causes than women.
But some women miss out too. Adolescent girls and young women in east and south Africa experience infection rates up to eight times higher than among their male peers.
Fewer than one in every five girls between 15 years and 19 years of age are aware of their HIV status, the report said.

Testing also remains low among 'key populations' and their partners - particularly among sex workers, transgenders, people injecting drugs, and prisoners - who comprise approximately 44 per cent of the 1.9 million new adult HIV infections that occur each year, it said.
Self-testing has been shown to nearly double the frequency of HIV testing among men who have sex with men, and recent studies in Kenya found that male partners of pregnant women had twice the uptake of HIV testing when offered self-testing compared with standard testing.
Twenty three countries currently have national policies supporting HIV self-testing.
Many other countries are developing policies, but wide- scale implementation of HIV self-testing remains limited, the release said.

WHO supports free distribution of HIV self-test kits and other approaches that allow self-test kits to be bought at affordable prices.
It is also working to reduce costs further to increase access, the release said adding the new guidance aims to help countries scale up implementation.