The HIV cases in the Dormaa Municipality ore on the increase.
The Municipality recorded 197 cases in the first half of this year as against 159 for the same period last year.

Madam Florence Iddrisah, Dormaa Municipal Director of Health Services, said this at a one-day HIV counselling and health games for 1,300 youth at Aboabo No 2 near Dormaa Ahenkro.

The programme, under the theme “Counselling for Decision-Making”, was jointly organised by Dormaa Traditional Healers and Birth Attendants Association, a Dormaa-based NGO and the Alliance for Reproductive Health.

Prevalence of HIV/AIDS in Ghana has steadily declined as a result of enhanced multi-sectoral response programmes that aim at reducing the disease to less than one per cent, the Ghana AIDS Commission has said.

Professor Sakyi Awuku Amoa, Director-General of the commission, told the press that national prevalence had dropped to 1.9 per cent at the end of last year, from 2.2 per cent in 2006 and 3.6 per cent in 2004.

World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 15.1 -20.9 million women worldwide are HIV positive. And these figures account for almost half of the estimated 39.5 million adults living with the virus as at the last two years. In Ghana or elsewhere in Africa, the situation is not different. Many factors ranging from biological to socio-cultural can account for this high rate of HIV/AIDS infection among women. For instance, HIV is said to be transmitted from men to women much more easily than from women to men. This is because women reproductive organs contain mucous membrane that provides a large hospitable environment which facilitates infection of the virus easier in women than in men.