With nearly 80,000 personnel serving in UN peacekeeping missions, UN agencies have made strides in educating mission personnel about preventing HIV infection, but troop contributing countries must do their part, senior UN officials said Monday.

Jean-Marie Guehenno, UN Under-Secretary-General for Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) briefed the Security Council on progress made on HIV/AIDS prevention, testing and counselling in peacekeeping.

"The vast majority, over 87 per cent, of those who had been in mission for at least a month, had received AIDS awareness training, " Guehenno said.

The Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) provided DPKO critical technical and advisory support at headquarters and in the field as peacekeeping activities surged and DPKO personnel from 105 countries reached 66,000 in uniform and more than 13,000 international and national civilian employees in 17 peacekeeping and related field operations, he noted.

DPKO and UNAIDS were examining ways to maintain training for AIDS peer educators when they returned home and to ensure that they were agents of change both in their missions and at home, he added.

However, there are a small number of mission personnel who received training from within their battalions or detachments and fewer than 2 per cent had been briefed by their commanding officers, Guehenno said.

Ambassador Adamantios Vassilakis of Greece, the Council President for July, read a presidential statement after the briefing, saying "the Security Council recognizes that UN peacekeeping personnel can be important contributors to the response to HIV/AIDS, particularly for vulnerable communities in post-conflict environments."

"The Council welcomes the action taken by the Secretary General and the UN peacekeeping missions to integrate HIV/AIDS awareness in their mandated activities and outreach projects for vulnerable communities, and urges them to pay particular attention to the gender dimensions of HIV/AIDS," the statement said.

Source: Xinhua