A senior medical official, calling for greater awareness of the deadly HIV, has said that this is one area which is a stumbling block in the Kingdom’s otherwise excellent track record of keeping the disease under near-complete check.

Syed Zahid Bukhari, consultant microbiologist and director of infection prevention and control at Hera General Hospital in Makkah, said the prevalence of HIV in Saudi Arabia is as low as 0.1 percent and that the only obstacle in HIV prevention is that the issue is not discussed openly with communities and in educational institutions.

“Information dissemination among children about HIV by competent persons is better than children getting infected with this deadly disease which has no cure or vaccine,” he said.

Saying that the aim of the World AIDS Day is to raise awareness about HIV, he said this year's theme of “Getting to Zero” is powerful and tough. “It means zero new HIV infections, zero discrimination and zero AIDS-related deaths,” he said.

He said that statistics at the end of December, 2012, showed that there were 35.2 million adults and children living with HIV globally. Besides, there are 3.3 million cases of newly infected adults and children, the report said, adding that AIDS-related deaths among adults and children stood at 1.6 million. There are 17.3 million children in the 0-17 age group who lost their parents to HIV/AIDS.

The prevalence rate among the age group 15-49 years was 0.8 percent while in Saudi Arabia it is just less than 0.1 percent. “Getting to zero is a big challenge, and our planning should be very fast, very smart and better than what it was in the previous years,” he said.

Bukhari stressed that there were many good things done by the Ministry of Health in HIV prevention like 100 percent screening of blood and blood components before transfusion, premarital screening of blood, program of disposal of needles in government and private hospitals and the medical waste program to ensure zero percent chance of recycling of medical waste.

Pointing out that the MoH efforts had also been appreciated by World Health Organization, he said: “With anti-retroviral treatment, you can only prolong the life of HIV positive patients. I believe that awareness about HIV plays a big role in HIV prevention.”



“If we follow Islamic education, we can achieve zero new infection in coming years. Islamic practice is the real application of A and B and when AB is applied, then there is no need to use C,” he said.