{"id":2542,"date":"2011-06-09T12:51:07","date_gmt":"2011-06-09T12:51:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/?p=2542"},"modified":"2011-06-09T12:51:07","modified_gmt":"2011-06-09T12:51:07","slug":"no-extra-pay-for-hiv-civil-servants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/2011\/06\/09\/no-extra-pay-for-hiv-civil-servants\/","title":{"rendered":"No extra pay for HIV+ civil servants"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <strong>Malawi has phased out a scheme to give extra payments to nearly 40,000 civil servants with HIV, authorities said Thursday, accusing some workers of spending the money on beer and prostitutes.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.faceofmalawi.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/Nurse_326320b.jpg\" alt=\"\" title=\"Nurse_326320b\" width=\"300\" height=\"207\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-2543\" \/>Instead, the government will hand out a monthly &#8220;nutrition food bag&#8221; equivalent to $35 (26 euros), said Mary Shaba, secretary for nutrition, HIV and AIDS.<\/p>\n<p>The scheme was launched in 2007, but was grossly abused with hundreds of workers claiming to have HIV in order to cash in on the payment, she said in a statement.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;The patients will now receive a nutrition food bag instead, as the money was not spent on its intended purpose to buy extra food and improve nutrition,&#8221; she said.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Some people used the money to buy beers and go out with prostitutes, further spreading the virus,&#8221; said Shaba, who engineered the scheme.<\/p>\n<p>Shaba said the monthly payments were a civil service workplace programme aimed at improving nutrition to allow people with HIV to respond to treatment quickly.<\/p>\n<p>Malawi has nearly 170,000 civil servants, whose average wage is $100.<\/p>\n<p>Half of Malawi&#8217;s 13 million citizens live on less than a dollar a day and are unable to meet their nutritional needs.<\/p>\n<p>Around 14 percent of the country&#8217;s population is HIV positive. The pandemic, which kills over 85,000 people a year due to AIDS-related illness, has cut life expectancy in the southern African nation to 36.<\/p>\n<p>The government says it now provides free AIDS drugs to 366,000 people, from 5,000 in 2004.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Malawi has phased out a scheme to give extra payments to nearly 40,000 civil servants with HIV, authorities said Thursday, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2543,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[81],"tags":[729,529,258],"class_list":["post-2542","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-national-news","tag-civil-servants","tag-hiv","tag-malawi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2542\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.faceofmalawi.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}