Homosexuality cause of increased HIV/AIDS infections among couples– UNAIDS

The United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS has disclosed at a just ended UNAIDS conference in Abidjan Cote D'Ivoire that, more married couples in Africa are getting infected with the deadly virus.

According to the UNAIDS there has been a 66% rise in infection of HIV/AIDS among couples because, there are a lot of laws criminalising homosexuality and lesbianism in many African countries.

UNAIDS Executive Director, Michel Sidibe, said the culture of Africans about marriage coupled with the rise in new infections among young girls in some parts of the continent, has also compounded the situation.

Most African countries have seen a decline in new HIV infections for the past few years, compared with Eastern Europe and Central Asia which saw an increase of new infections by 25% in the past 10 years.

Despite winning the fight in terms of containing new infections and even reducing mortality due to HIV, Sidibe said there is still a huge gap on the continent.

Kenya has almost 40% of new infections among stable couples with 66 percent of the new infections being discordant: a pair of long-term sexual partners in which one has a sexually transmitted infection and the other does not, he said.

"If you take 1.7 million people [who] are dying of AIDS-related illnesses, almost half of those people are from the developing world," he said, calling for prevention to make sure that couples infected had access to early treatment to stop transmission.

"So we need to be able to make treatment available as a human right, to people who are in need of treatment and that is what we need to address the future," he said.