The National Agency for the Control of AIDS (NACA) yesterday has said it recently discovered and identified about 3,500 male sex workers within the Abuja city centre.

The agency added that it is worried by these figures because over 60 per cent of these men are married, raising the concern of spouse HIV transmission.

At its maiden lecture yesterday to mark this year’s World AIDS day in Abuja with the theme- Strategies for Ending AIDS in Nigeria by 2030, the Director General of NACA, Professor John Idoko said the agency is now targeting hotspot areas in its drive to end the HIV epidemic.

“Within the Federal Capital Territory, we found that if we focus our resources in three council areas of Gwagwalada, Bwari and Abuja Municipal, we would have covered a greater population of persons with HIV within the area,”

Idoko said the agency is developing interventions to be able to reduce contact between infected and uninfected persons.

In his lecture, Professor James Blanchard, director of Global Health at the University of Manitoba, Canada said that even with modern technologies, HIV prevention is a very complex thing because there are social factors that need to be addressed like political commitment and advocacy, laws and labour policies, community mobilisation and a host of other things.

He said Nigeria is a very large and complex country and reaching those who need to receive the treatment requires that the country focus on the right environment and high risk areas.

“We need to match our HIV interventions with the population of HIV distribution. We need to get down to the micro level to know where we put our resources. We have the sex workers, persons who inject drugs and men who have sex with men,” he said.

He explained that the NACA survey has identified eight priority states in Nigeria because HIV is not evenly distributed adding that there are very large populations in parts of FCT, Lagos, Nasarawa and Benue.

He said: “We found that in Benue, 60 per cent of men who visited bars, restaurants and hotels were seeking sexual partners while 12 per cent of the females were seeking sexual partners and 9 percent of those who patronise these places are female sex workers.

“We also noticed substantial risk behaviour in rural areas. In Benue, 30 per cent of the unmarried men had visited a worker and 18 per cent had visited a sex worker within the last one month. But this was not the same across the state as some places were high risk areas.”

•Credit (except for headline): LEADERSHIP.