High infection rate
\n<\/strong>With purple-painted nails and dreams of being a civil engineer, the 19-year-old student is one of Zambia\u2019s many teenagers living with HIV.<\/p>\n\u201cAt other clinics, they don\u2019t tell you what to do, they just tell you you\u2019re positive and send you home with the drugs,\u201d said Mwanangumbi.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s when people kill themselves \u2013 because they think it\u2019s the end of the world.\u201d<\/p>\n
UNAIids, the UN agency battling the disease, estimates 2.1 million adolescents are living with HIV in 2013, 80 percent of them in sub-Saharan Africa.<\/p>\n
Zambia has one of the highest HIV infection rates in the world \u2013 an estimated 13 percent of its 14 million people are infected.<\/p>\n
Signs of the epidemic are everywhere.<\/p>\n
In the Saturday Post<\/em> newspaper nearly half of the classifieds section is filled with adverts for herbal cures for HIV and Aids, alongside remedies for \u00a0wide hips and reclaiming lost lovers.<\/p>\nAnd while U-Report is starting to address the teenage HIV crisis, the barriers to success in the country are high. Even if teens get access to counseling, they may struggle to find a suitable clinic in Zambia, where there is a chronic shortage of doctors and health workers.<\/p>\n
Medical services and technology
\n<\/strong>Yet there has never been a better time for a mobile phoned-based counseling service.<\/p>\nBy the end of 2014, there will be more than 635 million mobile subscriptions in sub-Saharan Africa, a number set to grow as phones become cheaper and data more readily available, said Swedish technology company Ericsson in a recent report.<\/p>\n
Zambia\u2019s text message experiment is part of an international trend that is seeing medical services being provided via\u00a0technology, with digitally savvy teens the quickest to adapt.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe long-term findings on adolescents, health care and computer technologies is that they often prefer them to face-to-face communication,\u201d said Kevin Patrick, director at the Center for Wireless and Population Health Systems at the University of California, San Diego.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey will more likely confide in a computer about sensitive issues.\u201d<\/p>\n
And as Zambia wrestles to shore up its overwhelmed health care system, inexpensive mobile technology could help ease the strain.<\/p>\n
\u201cApps exist to help people locate the closest HIV testing site,\u201d said David Moore, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, researching mobile technologies and HIV. \u201cWhat if you could do something like an HIV rapid test using an app on your phone? That could be a game changer in terms of HIV incidence.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by M&G 03.12.2014 A Zambian HIV counsellor looks at text messages coming up on the U-report platform for HIV and Aids awareness at a call centre in Lusaka. (Pic: AFP) The questions teenagers ask about HIV are brutally honest,…<\/span><\/p>\nRead more ›<\/a><\/div>\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oct_exclude_from_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":331,"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/331"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whid.co\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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