COUNCIL'S BOSS RAISES ALARM OVER HIGH SPREAD OF HIV AND AIDS!!!!!

Chairman of Akpabuyo Local Government Area, Cross River State, Dr. Patrick Ene Okon has said that recent findings in the area reveal that there was upsurge in the spread of HIV and AIDS, calling for urgent intervention to curtail further spread.

He said this development was discovered when one of the United Kingdom organizations visited the area to render free medical service to the locals and as a result, came up with a huge number of those tested positive of the virus.

The council boss who disclosed this recently when a team from the United States Agency for International Development USAID visited him in his office, maintained that most people tested of the virus were not aware of the scourge of the virus and also did not know their status which he said, was the reason behind the continues spread.

He advocated for proper education of the locals on the scourge of the virus by nongovernmental organizations in the country.

He lamented that the fall in crude oil was also affecting the third tier of government in the funding of some projects.

According to him “Any organization coming to support people’s lives is encouraged by my administration. We even call them to come and work with us because I want to see the people better-off in my tenure and their lives better than when I came.  We have really been having high incident of HIV now in this Local Government Area. There is one organization that came from the UK to provide free medical services and they were moving around some locations in the Area. Some people came and were tested and we discovered that many tested positive and if we don’t really work hard to lessen the spread it would become a huge problem because some of them do not even know that they were positive. We need to educate the people on the scourge of this virus”.

Earlier, The Programme Manager of USAID, Mr. Tessie Philips Onoye noted that the organization core aim was to add value to the lives of the people.

She said USAID was working to address those vulnerabilities especially the spread of the virus in some of the rural areas that have been discovered.