Dear Editor,
Increasingly among development practitioners is an awareness of the cultural and social context of interventions and the impacts of these on outcomes of policies and actions. The recent announcement that the Ministry of Health will be rolling out a self-testing HIV project is therefore perplexing.
This intervention does not take into consideration the social and cultural context of our society. In a traditional HIV test you are provided some counsel before and after the test to mitigate the psychological impacts. I am not sure what provisions are made for these safeguards in the self-test programme. Guyana does have one of the highest suicide rates per-capita and high levels of mental ill-health.
Yours faithfully,
(Name and address supplied)