The Eastern Regional AIDS Committee has appealed to the Regional Co-ordinating Council(RCC) to direct District and Municipal Assemblies in the region to release 0.5 per cent of their Common Funds for HIV/AIDS intervention programmes.
The committee said it was its view that it was only with such support that the HIV focal persons in the districts could undertake their monitoring activities and organize strategic programmes to help reduce the HIV/AIDS prevalence in the region.
The committee made the appeal at a meeting in Koforidua on Tuesday in reaction to reports that directives to District and Municipal Assemblies to use 0.5 per cent of their Common Fund to support HIV/AIDS were not being adhered to
As such, many District Assemblies were reluctant to release funds to support their District HIV Focal persons for activities to reduce HIV/AIDS infections.
The Eastern Region has an HIV/AIDS prevalence of 4.2, which is the highest in the country.
The committee called on District AIDS Focal persons to register all faith based healing centres in their districts so that they could include the leadership of those centres in the HIV and AIDS training programme.
The aim is to get them well informed about HIV and AIDS so that they could encourage people who visit their healing centres with symptoms of HIV to go for Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) to know their status and get early treatment when tested positive.
Addressing the meeting the Eastern Regional AIDS Focal Person, Ms Golda Asante, said a major concern of the region was the rate of default of people who are on Anti-Retroviral Treatment (ART).