Aghaz-e-Nau

What Young People Need to Know? The behavior of young people now will determine the future of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. If we cannot change the behavior of people who do not have HIV and AIDS, the disease will only spread even more widely. There are many different kinds of projects that can be used to reach young people. The most successful ones all over the world, have used the principle of “peer education”. This means that young people are trained to be the educators of other young people. They are much better at communicating with other young people and are not treated with the suspicion that young people might have for older people who come and tell them what to do with their lives. Young people need to be educated and learn how to deal with things like: Preventing HIV and AIDS through healthy and safe sexual practices Preventing sexually-transmitted infections Understanding drug-use and the spread of HIV and AIDS Understanding sex, reproduction and safe-sex Learning

What Young People Need to Know? The behavior of young people now will determine the future of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. If we cannot change the behavior of people who do not have HIV and AIDS, the disease will only spread even more widely. There are many different kinds of projects that can be used to reach young people. The most successful ones all over the world, have used the principle of “peer education”. This means that young people are trained to be the educators of other young people. They are much better at communicating with other young people and are not treated with the suspicion that young people might have for older people who come and tell them what to do with their lives. Young people need to be educated and learn how to deal with things like: Preventing HIV and AIDS through healthy and safe sexual practices Preventing sexually-transmitted infections Understanding drug-use and the spread of HIV and AIDS Understanding sex, reproduction and safe-sex Learning

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND Today, young people (15-24) account for 40 per cent of all new adult HIV infections. Each day, more than 2400 young people become infected with HIV—and some five million young people are living with HIV. Young people are a fulcrum. They remain at the center of the epidemic and they have the power, through their leadership, to definitively change the course of the AIDS epidemic. Experience over the past decade has demonstrated how to address HIV among young people . In countries with concentrated epidemics, programs and resources must focus on adolescents and youth who engage in risky behaviors, including injecting drugs, selling sex and men who have sex with men. In countries with generalized epidemics, where the general population is at risk, all vulnerable young people, particularly young women, need to be targeted priority in policy and program design. Evidence shows that sex education helps in reducing the risk of HIV by delaying the onset of sexual

BCC is an integral component of a comprehensive HIV/AIDS prevention, care and support program. It has a number of different but interrelated roles. Effective BCC can: Increase knowledge. BCC can ensure that people are given the basic facts about HIV and AIDS in a language or visual medium (or any other medium that they can understand and relate to). Stimulate community dialogue. BCC can encourage community and national discussions on the basic facts of HIV/AIDS and the underlying factors that contribute to the epidemic, such as risk behaviors and risk settings, environments and cultural practices related to sex and sexuality, and marginalized practices (such as drug use) that create these conditions. It can also stimulate discussion of healthcare-seeking behaviors for prevention, care and support. Promote essential attitude change. BCC can lead to appropriate attitudinal changes about, for example, perceived personal risk of HIV infection, belief in the right to and respo

I   Introduction Thirty percent of new global HIV infections now occur outside sub-Saharan Africa (which alone is home to almost 64% of all HIV infections), and of these, 30% now involve People Who Inject Drugs (PWID). This means that the sharing of injection equipment currently accounts for approximately one in every 10 new HIV infections in the world. HIV spreading among PWID has led to generalized epidemics in at least half a dozen countries. In some countries, HIV epidemics appear to have started with PWID sharing injecting equipment in prison. There are now an estimated 13 million PWID worldwide. Many spend several years of their period as PWID in prison. Injection drug use has been reported in 144 countries worldwide, among which 128 have detected HIV among PWID. Most HIV transmission among PWID involves the shared use of needles and syringes although other forms of injecting equipment, such as spoons and tourniquets, also make a contribution. As HIV prevalence in this po