NAIROBI, Dec 1 (AFP) - A consortium of Kenyan religious groups took the war against HIV/AIDS to pulpits and academic institutions on World AIDS Day on Sunday in an effort to curtail the spread of the deadly disease.
"We have committed to work and go out to our religious institutions and organisations to address problems of HIV/AIDS," the chairwoman of the Kenya Inter-Religious AIDS Consortium (KIRAC), Bishop Margaret Wanjiru, told a rally here marking World AIDS Day.
"AIDS will be discussed in places of worship, schools and training, open markets and at all meetings and gatherings," she said in a statment read at the rally.
During the rally, the government also reported a three percent drop in AIDS cases in Kenya.
"AIDS cases have dropped from 13 percent (of the population) in 2001 to around 10 percent this year," Health Minister Sam Ongeri told AFP at the rally, attended by more than 3,000 people.
Official figures have estimated that some 2.2 million of Kenya's 30 million population are HIV-positive.
"We have made some progress, but although our past clangers have cost many lives, we have the capacity to bring down the figure to single digit," said a senior health ministry official, who asked not to be named.
Several religious leaders admitted that their lack of knowledge had been responsible for the soaring of the AIDS crisis in Kenya.
"We want to confess that when we raised our voices in the past, the condemnation was not strong enough," Wanjiru said, a view held by several other religious leaders who addressed the rally.
"Due to lack of knowledge, we let our people perish, but we have now changed and are gravely concerned with enormous loss of human life and the biting sufferings from AIDS," she added.
The statement also cited stigma and discrimination suffered by AIDS victims as a major barrier to effective prevention, care and eventual eradication of the disease, first discovered here in the early 1980s.
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