The European Week for HIV-Hepatitis Test begins on Monday with free screenings across the country aimed mainly at the most vulnerable groups, the executive director of the GAT - Treatment Activists Group announced today to Lusa agency
Portugal joins this initiative for the ninth year, organized by EuroTest, reinforcing that screening for HIV, viral hepatitis and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) is a priority, at a time when gaps in the diagnosis of these infections still remain. hinders international strategies to eliminate them by 2030, as a serious public health problem, says the GAT.
Until November 29, it will be possible to carry out "free, quick and anonymous" screenings for these diseases in 33 organizations distributed throughout the country "from the Algarve to Minho", said the executive director of the GAT, Ricardo Fernandes, adding that those interested can find information about the locations on the European Test Week Facebook page.
For the GAT, screening aimed at the most vulnerable groups, in the context of combined prevention, is a priority service.
"We have a strategy to contain the epidemic that involves testing and diagnosis and all prevention technologies, condoms, PrEP [pre-exposure prophylaxis] (...) tools that have to be strategically well positioned so that we can reach a situation in which HIV is no longer a public health problem in Portugal”, defended Ricardo Fernandes.
The problem, he warned, is that if there is no investment in these tools, everything that is done will have “an individual impact – and thankfully it has – but not in terms of public health”.
Despite some limitations due to the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations working in the field of public health continue to provide STI screening, medical and nursing consultations, referral and linking to health care, distribution of condoms and lubricating gel, safer consumption materials and opiate substitution programs.
The organizations, a member of the Community Screening Network, promoted by the GAT, which join the initiative, emphasize the importance of maintaining these services and removing any barrier to accessing healthcare.
The European Test Week, considered Ricardo Fernandes, “is a great opportunity” to reach people, many of them already fragile, and offer them the test and, if reactive, refer them for treatment.
The official noted that, before the pandemic, the whole of Europe already had "very high numbers" of infection, it is estimated that one in five people were unaware that they were infected, and that in some countries people did not have the opportunity to undergo screening during the pandemic.
In Portugal, there are still between 5% and 10% of people to be identified, who are those to whom all the developed strategies have not reached.
“We must continue to work to reach these people because the dynamics of infection is a dynamic in which one person can infect several and, therefore, if we manage to reach these people in time, we will avoid infections”, he defended.
Forty years after HIV was first diagnosed, people still have "a devastating notion of this disease", but it is a "wrong notion" because it is already a pathology with a good prognosis, unlike what happened a few years ago.
On the other hand, they are not aware of the seriousness of the disease, thinking that it has already passed, when “Portugal is a top country” in the incidence of HIV in Western Europe, alternating positions with Latvia.
Although there is a “very small, but interesting trend in the decrease [in the number of new cases], it is still not enough for the size of the infection in Portugal and the weight it has from a social, budgetary and society".
According to the report “HIV and AIDS infection in Portugal – 2020”, 778 new cases of infection were diagnosed in 2019, 331 less compared to 2018.
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