Your daily Selection of IRIN Africa PlusNews reports, 2/21/2006

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1 - TANZANIA: HIV/AIDS counselling centres set up in prisons

1 - TANZANIA: HIV/AIDS counselling centres set up in prisons

DAR ES SALAAM, 21 February (PLUSNEWS) - In a move aimed at stepping up the

campaign against the spread of HIV/AIDS in prisons, the Tanzanian government has

started establishing vocational counselling and testing (VCT) centres to provide

services to penal institutions.

" We are now intensifying educational programmes through lectures and video

[shows] to wardens, prison officers and inmates, " Nicas Banzi, Tanzania's

principal commissioner of prisons, said on Monday.

So far, he said, the prisons department had established 12 centres in various

parts of the country, which provide services to inmates, prison workers and

their families. He added that the centres were part of a national programme to

fight the HIV/AIDS pandemic.

The government is supplying these centres with anti-retroviral drugs, Banzi

said.

He said one of the centres, at the Ukonga Maximum Security Prison in the

nation's commercial city of Dar es Salaam, was equipped with equipment to

determine the CD4 count in a patient's blood and those found with a low count

received treatment immediately.

Banzi spoke after a seminar held in Dar es Salaam to sensitive officials in the

prisons department on strategies to fight HIV/AIDS in the penal institutions.

He said the department's major challenge was to raise awareness among all its

employees and inmates in order to encourage them to use the centres.

" People with HIV/AIDS continue to be stigmatised, " he said, " and that is a big

problem making people become reluctant to take voluntary tests and [to] know

their status quite early, something that will make them start getting proper

treatment and care early. "

Official government records show that at least 7 percent of adult Tanzanians,

about two million people, are HIV-positive. However, it was not immediately

known how many of the country's estimated 50,000 inmates are living with

HIV/AIDS. There are fears that the virus could spread fast in the penal

institutions due to rampant homosexuality.

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