By Glenda Boza Ibarra (El Toque)
HAVANA TIMES – Approximately 1,600 people have been diagnosed with the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in Cuba so far in 2023, it was recently announced in the state-controlled media.
This figure is a cause for concern for health authorities and for society on the whole, as there are 100 more new cases (and the year isn’t over yet) compared to the 1,500 annual average in recent years.
Add to this the fact that there are a number of people who are HIV+ and haven’t been detected, so the transmission chain can continue.
According to a statement from Jorge Perez Avila, a doctor who has been studying HIV/AIDs for over 30 years, a percentage of people still don’t know they have the virus because tests weren’t being carried out during COVID-19 and lockdown.
Perez Avila admitted that 90% of cases that would have normally been diagnosed under normal circumstances, couldn’t be detected during the pandemic.
In January 2023, local media warned about rising HIV cases. In Holguin, 116 new cases were detected up until December 1st 2022, 31 more cases than in 2021. The eastern province is one of the six Cuban provinces with the highest numbers of cases detected in Cuba’s history of HIV.
Another province with rising numbers is Santiago de Cuba, where 307 cases were detected in 2022, a figure that is concerning for health authorities.
Women account for 19% of those living with HIV, and 30.5% of these women are over 50 years old. Within this last group, two women are over 90 years old.
Approximately 32,000 people live with HIV in Cuba ever since the first case was diagnosed in the 1980s. In 2022, 366 Cubans died and the total number of deaths is 6087, since April 1986 when the first HIV-related death was announced. Nevertheless, the death rate decreased from 3.6 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2021 to 3.3 in 2022.
Even though there have been breakthrough treatments for people living with the virus – Cuba eliminated mother-child transmission, for example -, condom shortages on the island are still a problem for prevention and treatment.
There is no prevention without condoms
Health awareness and sexual education campaigns aren’t enough to stop HIV. Condoms are the main form of prevention and there has been a condom crisis in Cuba for over ten years.
Even though condom shortages are probably the main reason for HIV and other STD cases soaring, there doesn’t seem to be a concrete measure to try and solve this.
“There is no better prevention than using a condom, and unfortunately, there haven’t been any in our drugstores for years. Are anti-retroviral drugs really cheaper than condoms?” a forum user called Ever asked in the comment section of an article on
