Health Education to Prevent HIV/AIDS & STIs - Department of ...

Department of Education TVET Division
HIV/AIDS & STI Teacher Guide
Learning outcome 3: Explain about the HIV and STI epidemics in
Papua New Guinea
Lesson 6
By the end of this lesson students can…
3.1 State the root causes of the HIV epidemics
3.2 Explain the current state of the epidemic (which groups of people are
infected, how many, etc)
3.3 Explain which groups are most vulnerable and why
Resources: Statement prepared on board or butcher paper
a. Introduction: (15 mins)
Ask students to discuss this statement “HIV is the biggest threat to development
in PNG” in pairs and share their feedback.
Then ask them to brainstorm as a class what the root causes of the epidemic in PNG
are and to think about what root causes impact on their own lives. Use the Resource
Book to double check these. Record them on the board.
b. Main Activity: (40 mins)
Say, “HIV was first reported by doctors 25 years ago (as a mysterious virus infecting
gay men in USA). Now it is found in every country. It is a global pandemic (this
means that it is a disease that spreads over a whole country or across the whole
world)”.
• 33 million people are infected world wide
• 25 million people have died of AIDS (5 times the population of PNG)
• Every day over 13,000 more people are infected
• Every day over 8,000 people die
Divide the class into groups of four. Ask them to interpret the two graphs on the
HIV/AIDS epidemic from the Students’ Resource Book. Try and get up-to-date
statistics if you can from your Provincial AIDS Committee.
i) Ask them to discuss and interpret the graph on new and cumulative confirmed
cases.
Make sure they include in the feedback: steady but low increase in new cases; blood
test results from VCT centres, STI clinics and antenatal testing; reporting system is
improving; increase could also be due to more people being tested; virus may have
been in PNG before 1987 because there was no awareness or testing then; data
collected and reported by the National AIDS Council
Say, “Most people in PNG do not know they have HIV because there are no
symptoms. You don’t know unless you have an HIV blood test. The real number of
infected people is unknown – 2007 estimate is 60,000 (NACS)”
ii) Ask the groups to discuss and interpret the graph on age/sex and feedback to the
class.
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