Nowadays, all the world community is facing an anxious issue about food insecure. At the same time many disease keep emerge and is still waiting for medical research and therapy. This article try to describe how the disease, hereby HIV, food and nutrition are linked.
These three variables are linked in two important ways. First, the absence of an adequate diet means that HIV care and treatment programmes must supply multiple micronutrient preparations. It is because of the energy requirements of HIV-infected individuals increase by about 10% from the time of infection and 20%-30% when chronic opportunistic infections are present.
The second link is the growing realization that food insecurity may increase HIV risk transmission behaviours and susceptibility to HIV once exposed. Poverty can lead to individual behaviour in ways that place health and safety at risk. But the spesific mechanisms about how food insecurity influences risk-taking behaviour and consequent vulneraility to HIV transmission is still little known.
In a very striking result research as mentioned in this full reading article, food insufficiency was associated with increased HIV behaviour and the risk appeared more marked in women than men. And the risk behaviour included inconsistent condom use, sex exchange, increased intergenerational sex, and lack of control over sexual relationships. Thus, it is obvious that the absence of adequate food for oneself or one’s family, individuals will lost longterm personal safety to survive.
Maybe from these finding, it needs to consider hunger alleviation as a central component of HIV prevention programmes. National governments and international agencies have to invest in reducing hunger by improving infrastructure and development. As said in this articles, reducing food insecurity is complex, especially with HIV issues in it. And it remained a question, would it be unethical to provide foods for the purpose of reducing HIV transmission risk as away of reducing commercial sex work in poor, food-insecure regions or communities?
Could conditional grants, for example, giving adolescent girls monthly allowances, be used to reduce gender pressures and HIV incidence in communities with high unemployment
and teenage pregnancy rates? Would the economics of hunger reduction
satisfy the donors focused on HIV?
Find this interesting article – wrote by Nigel Rollins in Full Text Read or this PDF Format. Thank You


nice
February 24, 2009 @ 2:48 pm