Over 450 new HIV cases recorded in past year – Health Minister calls for vigilance

…says “prevention is everyone’s responsibility”

The Health Ministry and the National AIDS Programme Secretariat are sounding an urgent appeal for national vigilance after approximately 449 new HIV infections were diagnosed locally over the past year, amid continued regional transmission across the Caribbean.
Head of the National AIDS Programme Secretariat, Dr Tariq Jagnarine, received commendation from Health Minister Dr Frank Anthony for sustaining three decades of work in the fight against HIV, as the country’s detection rates remain aligned with wider Caribbean public health trends.
Data released by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) confirms that over the last year, 15,000 new infections were recorded across the Caribbean, with 340,000 persons now living with HIV regionally. The same reporting body verified that Guyana’s confirmed 449 new cases form part of this broader epidemiological movement, a trend public health experts note remains deeply influenced by preventable behavioural risk factors.
The Health Minister delivered these remarks at the 2025 World AIDS Day Conference, where he acknowledged the country’s progress since the crisis years of the 1990s, when treatment was limited, testing infrastructure was underdeveloped, and stigma dictated the silence of suffering families.
Reflecting on the early days of the epidemic, Anthony recounted the emotional toll of diagnosis at a time when medicine offered little hope. “Back in those days it was a terrible experience for someone diagnosed with HIV. And why it was terrible? Because we did not have treatment. In some instances, we did not have the means to test. When you saw patients, you saw them at the end stage, when they already had AIDS. And at that point, there was not much that could be done,” he said.
Govt fully fund treatment
With this in mind, the Minister affirmed that Guyana has made formidable strides in transforming HIV from a terminal diagnosis into a manageable health condition, with the tools for prevention, early care, viral monitoring, and widespread treatment now institutionalised within the national system.
A critical milestone in this transformation was Guyana’s self-reliant approach to HIV financing. “Our programme does not depend on foreign funding. Every test, every tablet for HIV or ARVs, and the tests to check to see if people are virally suppressed, is from the funds provided by the Government of Guyana. Not many countries can say that,” he stated.
Expanding on this point, he credited consistent investment in diagnostic innovation, including the procurement of advanced viral load technology. “Now up to about three to four years ago, it was very expensive to be able to do the viral load testing. But again, the Government of Guyana would have invested close to half a million US dollars to buy the viral load equipment to ensure that for all the persons who are on treatment and we need to do their viral loads, that we have the capacity to do the viral load to check, and therefore by doing that we will be able to guide treatment for these persons. And so we have come a long way, and now you have all the tools at our disposal to ensure that we reduce further the cases of, well, the new cases of HIV to begin with and those who are already infected, that we work with that population to ensure that we have all of them being virally suppressed,” he explained.
Officials from UNICEF were also recognised for supporting expanded immunisation engagement, self-testing expansion, and public education initiatives, particularly among adolescent populations vulnerable to prevention fatigue.
However, even with expanded treatment capability, the Minister cautioned that failure points in HIV control are increasingly social, not biomedical.
“The big problem is not the tools. The big problem is people’s behaviour. Because although we educate people, many infections could still have been prevented if people convert knowledge into a change of behaviour,” he asserted.