World Aids Day: Living positively in Nigeria

As World Aids Day approaches, Your Say writer Amy Merone talks about the situation in Nigeria, where she is a HIV health volunteer.

World AIDS Day, 1 December 2006. Amina wears a t-shirt with the words ''Akiyaye Kanjamau'' (''Beware of HIV''). Amina says that she has met many people who are HIV positive and many of them are young women who are vulnerable to contracting the virus in a country where gender imbalance is profound.

Amina Dauda emerges from the modest house she shares with her brothers and sisters, wearing a t-shirt with the words "Akiyaye Kanjamau" ("Beware of HIV") emblazoned on the back.

"My place is not smart," she tells me. "But I hope it will be ok." Amina lives on the outskirts of Kubwa, Nigeria, a settlement town of approximately 1 million people within the Federal Capital Territory (FCT). She is one of 4.8 million people infected with HIV in Nigeria.

Amina tested positive for the virus in 2004 after experiencing serious sickness and rapid weight loss. She says she can remember vividly her feelings when she was told the result. "I shouted and shouted," she says. "I felt so bad. The nurses took me to see a counsellor and even she said that because my CD4 count was so low, she thought I would die.

"They rushed me to hospital and I started taking anti-retroviral drugs straight away, which I was told would cost me 7,000 naira a month (about £28). At first my sister helped me to find the money, because I just didn't have it, but then after six months my sister lost her job and there was no money for the drugs so I just had to stop taking them."

In Nigeria, 70 per cent of the population lives on less than $1 a day. In many rural states there is little access to anti-retroviral treatments and, where there is, the cost prevents most people from being able to afford them. With one of the poorest healthcare systems in the world, hundreds of thousands of Nigerians are dying every year from AIDS and AIDS-related illnesses.

In Kubwa, the Daughters of Charity has an HIV clinic which provides free voluntary counselling and testing, viral load testing and CD4 counts, and free anti-retroviral drugs. Dr Onu, the HIV specialist working at the clinic says that soon the clinic's facilities will be exceeded by the number of HIV-positive people requiring treatment and services.

"I believe that the national statistics for people living with HIV in Nigeria mask the true reality," he explains. "There are many more people infected than we know about, especially in the rural areas. It's very sad because, for a lot of the HIV patients that are admitted to our hospital, they come when it is too late, when they are dying."

Amina says that she feels like she is one of the lucky ones. After stopping her treatment because of the cost of the drugs, she says that she turned to God and prayer instead, but after six months she was once again admitted to hospital. There she met members of a support group who told her that she could receive anti-retroviral treatments for free.

"It was like I had been given my life back again," she says. "Suddenly I did not have to worry about where I would find the money each month for my treatments. In my mind I knew that I wasn't the only person living with HIV and so I started to attend a support group at the Daughters of Charity and met other people who were living positively with the virus.

"I felt happy again, like I could start living once more and so I decided to visit communities to enlighten them about the virus and encourage them to test for HIV. There are still people who refuse to accept that it is real. I have to show them my drugs and say, 'yes, I am positive, but I am alive'."

Amina says that she has met many people who are HIV positive and many of them are young women who are vulnerable to contracting the virus in a country where gender imbalance is profound.

"During the time I was in hospital I met so many young women who were infected, some of whom had been raped or pressurised into having sex," she says.

"For me, even to this day, I wonder about how I contracted the virus, but I know that I am not the first and I won't be the last. I tell people now that HIV is real, but with anti-retroviral treatments it does not need to mean the end of life."