21st August, 2017
The Beacon of Youth Initiative (BYI), an NGO, says it has trained 50 health workers on Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV/AIDS in Nasarawa State.
The Executive Director and Programme Manager of the organisation, Mr Okolo Envoh, disclosed this in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Jos on Monday.
According to him, the beneficiaries are drawn from Lafia and Nasarawa Eggon Local Government Areas of the state.
The executive director described the two areas as the local governments with high prevalence of the PMTCT in the state.
He added that the training was being executed under a project tagged “Positive Action for Children Fund (PACF)’’, was supported by ViiV HealthCare, an international NGO.
“The training was aimed at building the capacity of healthcare givers in Lafia and Nasarawa Eggon LGAs because before now, the statistics available to us indicate high prevalence of PMTCT in those two areas.
“We carried out the training in two batches; 25 in 2016, while the remaining 25 were trained this year.
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“The trainees will help in ensuring that health workers will effectively carry out better services to eliminate mother to child transmission in the areas”, noting that training has indeed yielded positive result.
“As I speak to you, we are able to curtail mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS by 80 per cent in those two localities,” he said.
Envoh added that his organisation also trained 40 Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) in the two localities on PMTCT with specifications on referral of cases to health facilities.
He called on the government and other organisations to support the efforts in scaling up the service to other areas of the state.