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17.12.2014 General News

AIDS Commission Hot -Invites Dzidzor To Solve Issues

By Daily Guide
AIDS Commission Hot -Invites Dzidzor To Solve Issues
17.12.2014 LISTEN

  Joyce Dzidzor Mensah 
The Ghana AIDS Commission will this afternoon hold a crunch closed-door meeting with Joyce Dzidzor Mensah, the AIDS Ambassador who made a u-turn on Monday and told NEWS-ONE she had never tested positive for HIV but was only telling the nation and the world a lie just to satisfy her interests.

NEWS-ONE has gathered that today's meeting was at the invitation of the Commission and the agenda will be to address the issues raised by Joyce.

The specific issues to be discussed were not stipulated but there are indications that the Commission may want to force or coax Dzidzor into conducting an HIV test.

In what looks like the scandal of the year, the Commission has failed to explain categorically the grounds on which it got convinced that Joyce was HIV positive before signing her to the ambassadorial position.

All the Commission did was to issue a press statement which said it has evidence that Joyce had tested HIV positive in 2007.

Joyce has however insisted that the AIDS Commission was only on a face-saving gimmick and that at no point did the Commission or its agents conduct any test on her to ascertain her HIV status.

The AIDS Commission, after receiving a huge public backlash over the confession from Joyce, has also come out to say it terminated its appointment with her as far back as November 2012.

Surprisingly, the AIDS Commission has explained that it decided not to make public the fact that Joyce Mensah was no longer the AIDS Ambassador though it said the termination of her appointment was because she was using the position to advance her personal interests.

Also, it is not certain whether Dzidzor will attend the proposed meeting or not.

On Monday, this was how Joyce explained her situation to NEWS-ONE :

'I met a man in my church where I used to fellowship. We fell in love but I didn't know of his HIV status.

Though he knew he was HIV positive, he never told me. A member of the church who is a nurse once saw me with him and she called me to advise me. The nurse advised me to be careful with him because she knew of his HIV status. Unfortunately for me, I met the nurse just a day after I had sex with the man.

I then confided in the nurse and she asked me to quickly report at the hospital so that I can be given PEP ( Post Exposure Profilaxis ). I did exactly that in order not to contract the HIV virus.

I became pregnant though, but I decided to keep the pregnancy.

My boyfriend fell sick and died before I had the baby. People stigmatised me without knowing if I contracted HIV from him or not. I was eventually beaten and thrown out of the house I was living in with my parents. Having nowhere to stay, I went to live in the secretariat of associations of persons living with HIV.

I played along and behaved as if I had HIV too just to have a place to lay my head and learn from people living with HIV. I attended a lot of workshops organised by NGOs on HIV just to equip myself with information. I heard a lot of interesting HIV stories from people on stigma related issues.

At a point in time, I accepted and lived like a person living with HIV. And I always told my story as if I was living with HIV. I shared my story based on what I went through just to let people know that people with HIV are normal human beings.

I would have contracted the virus and probably died but God saved me. That was why going to schools to educate them became my passion just for students to abstain from premarital sex.

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