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Int'l medical charity calls for support for HIV/AID patients in Kenya

Xinhua, November 29, 2015 Adjust font size:

An International medical charity has called for support to HIV-positive people under antiretroviral therapy (ART), including at hospital level, in Kenya, saying despite better access to treatment, many AIDS patients still die.

Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said in a study released on Saturday that among 690 patients (aged 13 and more) admitted in Homa Bay hospital, in Western Kenya, between December 2014 and March, AIDS accounted for more than a third of admissions and 55 percent of deaths.

"Half these cases were patients failing their treatment, and showing new opportunistic infections despite having started ART," the study finds.

The study, which focuses on the inpatient population in a referral hospital during a given period of time, is consistent with MSF's experience in other hospitals in sub-Saharan Africa where significant rates of AIDS patients are found in wards, despite being diagnosed and started on ART at some point in their lives.

William Hennequin, MSF representative in Kenya, said the huge rise in access to ART should go hand-in-hand with more patient support, better early detection of treatment failures, and greater hospital care for those HIV patients who need it.

Currently, Hennequin added, those patients are being left behind. Diagnostic capacities and clinical care in African settings often fail to address AIDS cases, Hennequin added.

"At a time when new WHO recommendations dramatically increase the number of patients eligible for ART, the capacity to follow and accompany people throughout the course of their treatment, including at hospital level, is a crucial stake," he said.

The charity said it will present these results at the International Conference on AIDS and STIs (Sexually transmitted infections) in Africa (ICASA) taking place in Zimbabwe from Nov. 29 to Dec. 4.

According to a latest report from the National Aids Control Council (NACC), Kenya has experienced one of the most severe HIV and Aids epidemics, having the 4th largest people living with HIV population globally.

NACC says in the report released in September that of the 1.6 million people living with HIV in Kenya, 16 percent are the youth and adolescents. The study also shows that youth aged 15-24 contribute 21 percent of the total new infections in the country which stands at 100,000 annually.

The MSF study says appropriate counselling, from the moment people are diagnosed with HIV and at all steps of their life-long treatment, and access to routine viral load monitoring, the most effective tool to detect breaches in treatment, can prevent people from reaching a critical stage of treatment failure.

It also says that treatments could also be made easier to follow for patients, by further developing decentralized HIV care in rural health facilities to help prevent people from reaching a critical stage of treatment failure. Enditem