DAVAO CITY–Davao City is no longer in the top 5 areas with the highest number of Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) cases in the Philippines, according to city health education and population officer Priscilla Senoc on Thursday.
Senoc said the city dropped to number 6 in the latest HIV/AIDS registry of the Department of Health (DOH) with 43 of 912 total new cases in the whole country.
Previously, Davao City recorded 52 cases. Senoc said the drop in ranking could be due to the spike in HIV cases in other provinces.
“Ang usa ka factor niana kay ang ubang provinces kay nag increase pud ilang mga cases (One of the factors there could be due to the increase of HIV/AIDs cases in other provinces,” she said during the I-Speak Forum on Thursday.
Based on the data of the DOH, Senoc said the National Capital Region (NCR) is topped with most number of cases at 294 followed by Region 4-A (Calabarzon) with 153, Region 7 (Central Visayas) with 85, Region 3 (Central Luzon) with 85 and Region 6 (Western Visayas) with 50.
With the drop in HIV-AIDs cases, Senoc said the people should not be complacent since there are 32 new cases being recorded every day which is higher than last year’s 30.
The DOH report showed that there were 21 deaths recorded from HIV/AIDS. Sexual contact remained as the predominant mode of transmission with 899 of the 912 cases. A total of 774 cases or 86 percent of them were males who had sex with males (MSM) population.
The MSM recorded 542 cases followed by 232 for those having sex with both male and female or bisexuals and 125 for male-to-female sexual contact.
Another mode of transmission was needle sharing among drug users, totaling to 11 cases.
The number of cases in January already reached 1,021 and February with 871 cases, bringing the total for the first quarter of 2018 to 2,804 new HIV cases.
From 1984 up to the March 2018, a total of 53,192 HIV cases were recorded by the DOH. Of the number, 5,484 cases developed into AIDS cases that resulted in 2,518 deaths.
For his part, Mindanao Aids Alliance Advocates Inc. (MAAAI) secretary Razz Catipay urged all people to take the HIV test especially those people with multiple partners to ensure their health status.
Catipay said that his group is now making efforts to reach out to people in workplaces to encourage them to take the test. This is to ensure that if ever they have the virus, it would be supppressed with Anti-Retroviral medicines which are given free by the DOH.
He said the workplaces that his group visited are the banana plantations and Business Processing and Outsourcing Companies in the region.
Meanwhile, Senoc said the Davao City AIDS Council will stage the International AIDS Candle Light Memorial on Friday afternoon to commemorate the people who died of due to HIV and AIDS.
“There will be candle lighting and prayer and that will be a moment of prayer for those who died with AIDS,” she said. (Armando Fenequito Jr/PNA)
