Zahra Gor­don

The Min­istry of Tourism will soon em­bark on a pub­lic re­la­tions cam­paign to "cor­rect" a state­ment made by Trinidad-born rap­per Nic­ki Mi­naj that 250,000 peo­ple were liv­ing with Aids in T&T. Tourism Min­is­ter Stephen Cadiz, now at­tend­ing the World Trav­el Mar­ket in Lon­don, said in a tele­phone in­ter­view yes­ter­day that the state­ment was "ob­vi­ous­ly er­ro­neous and has to be cor­rect­ed."

Mi­naj made the com­ment in an in­ter­view with the UK Guardian last Thurs­day. She al­so said 40 per cent of lo­cal ado­les­cents were not ed­u­cat­ed about HIV/Aids. Mi­naj is the face of Mac Cos­met­ics' 2012 Vi­va Glam line of lip­sticks.

Vi­va Glam sales sup­port the Mac Aids Fund, a char­i­ty or­gan­i­sa­tion pro­vid­ing grants to non-gov­ern­men­tal or­gan­i­sa­tions and com­mu­ni­ty pro­grammes fo­cused on HIV/Aids out­reach. Ac­cord­ing to the fund's Web site, Macaids­fund.org, US$10 mil­lion has been do­nat­ed to Caribbean pro­grammes since 2007.

Cadiz said he was not "over­ly con­cerned" by the state­ment, adding that lo­cal HIV/Aids preva­lence had nev­er had a neg­a­tive ef­fect on tourism. He could not say when the pub­lic re­la­tions ex­er­cise would be­gin or what it would in­clude. Health Min­is­ter Dr Fuad Khan laud­ed Mi­naj for her mu­si­cal tal­ents, but sug­gest­ed she speak with Min­is­ter of State in the Of­fice of the Prime Min­is­ter (OPM) Rodger Samuel.

Samuel is re­spon­si­ble for the HIV/Aids port­fo­lio in the OPM, but could not be reached for com­ment yes­ter­day. The most re­cent coun­try progress re­port sub­mit­ted by the OPM to UN­AIDS, the joint Unit­ed Na­tions pro­gramme on HIV/Aids, said the es­ti­mat­ed num­ber of peo­ple liv­ing with HIV/Aids at the end of 2010 was 22,787.

For­mer tech­ni­cal di­rec­tor of the Na­tion­al Aids Co-or­di­nat­ing Com­mit­tee (NACC) Dr Amery Browne said yes­ter­day the fig­ure was ac­tu­al­ly clos­er to 25,000 peo­ple. He said the sta­tis­tics about youth HIV/Aids ed­u­ca­tion would be dif­fi­cult to gath­er.