The genuine reason why anybody can be a victim of HIV.
Yesterday I released Healthy Reminder Bot. A Facebook messenger bot that reminds people to go for monthly HIV test. The reason I made the bot is explained in this article.
Thanks to multitude of various Government and Non-Government organisations, general knowledge and awareness of HIV is at its peak. However based on my experience as a former executive of the Corp Peers and Educators Group (AKA Anti-HIV group) of the National Youth Service Corp, a lot of people think having safe sex will automatically make them immune from HIV, this is a big fallacy.
While sex is a major medium through which the virus is distributed, it is necessary to understand that person to person HIV infection occurs basically not because of sex but because some fluids from the body of an infected person comes in contact with your mucous membrane or a damaged tissue in your body or injected directly into your blood stream (via contaminated blade, syringe etc). That is to say, you could possibly be infected with HIV by being social or through accidents.
Being social is wired into us as human beings and accidents are part of our daily lives. Therefore, we are all at risk of being infected with the virus because, you know, we are humans.
This is where getting tested regularly comes in, not because test is a cure but because it’s important if we are to win the war against HIV. The most important thing about test is the knowledge of HIV status it provide. Early test means early treatment and a relatively healthy life for an infected person through drugs that prevents the virus from progressing to the next stage and also stop onward transmission. It also means, people who are endangered by the infected person can start taking drugs that prevents infection.
While many of us recognize the importance of HIV test, we still struggle to get tested regularly. Even people whose lifestyle put them in danger of getting infected with HIV are guilty of this. ‘Out of sight is out of mind’, many of us, I believe, will remember to keep up with regular test if we can be reminded regularly. Everyone has a lot to think about these days.
Knowing that ‘out of sight is out of mind’, I have decided to create a simple and social Facebook messenger bot that will remind people to go for regular HIV test.
Hello world, please accept my humble donation towards empowering people to lead a healthy lifestyle. Thank you.
