Clarendon Women Participate in HIV/AIDS Risk Assessment

Under the theme ‘Women and AIDS’ the Clarendon Health Department focused on assessing the risk of women contracting the HIV virus in the parish as part of their celebration for World AIDS day on December 1.
In a recent JIS News interview Health Educator for the parish, Shelton Maxwell, explained that an outreach activity was held in the centre of the town, where 312 women participated in the risk assessment exercise.
“Women are twice as likely to get HIV/AIDS than their male counterpart as is evident in the statistics and we’re targeting everybody but we have what we call some risk cards and we targeted at least 200 women to fill out their risk cards which is really a measure of how they feel whether they think they’re at risk of getting HIV/AIDS or not,” he said.
The results of the assessment were presented to the public at various fora. Persons were also able to benefit from counselling, the distribution of condoms and educational material.
As at December 1, 2004, more than 700 persons in Clarendon have been reported as living with HIV/AIDS with 128 new cases reported since the start of the year.