Since December 2014, the country has experienced sporadic stock outs of ARVs in most of the public health facilities. While some have been availed with drugs, this issue has been on and off the agenda at most of the facilities. A number of calls have been made to people living with HIV and a few health workers in about 30 districts and they have confirmed stock out of ARVs, Dapson, pediatric septrin, drugs for opportunistic infections and other commodities like test kits reagents for CD4 counts, mama kits and condoms.
It is unfortunate that this is happening at the time when our government has adopted the new WHO treatment guidelines of getting whoever has CD4 counts below 500 on treatment. The government is launching eMTCT campaigns yet there are stock outs of Nevirapine syrups for infants at the health facilities. Besides this, we have people in need of treatment queuing up and HIV testing which is a critical entry point to treatment access, eMTCT services and prevention of sexual transmission of HIV is being affected by absence of the kits which doesn’t help efforts to combat the disease.
In most of the health facilities, clients have been forced to start on other regimens because that is what is available and others are going without drugs.
There has been substitution of Nevirapine 200MG with Nevirapine 50MG tablets that are meant for babies. This is done in the name of avoiding wastage but the fact that they are over stocked at the National Medical Stores (NMS) brings about the high risk of expiry. This means someone has to take four Nevirapine tables as opposed to the one tablet so as to make to 200MG.
ICWEA has learnt that NMS missed an entire delivery cycle that led to ARV and TB stock outs. We are tired of the many excuses we get from the government about poor programming, supply chain challenges, and yet the Ministry of Health passed a policy in 2011 to integrate and harmonize supply chain management activities of essential medicines including TB medicines. This was aimed at having one reliable system where planning, procurement, distribution and monitoring of medicines availability can be easily tracked.
Ministry of Health should come out and respond to the situation by providing treatment to whoever is need to avoid cases of poor adherence, increase in MDR cases and shooting of new HIV infections. We cannot watch people die as huge amounts of money are going into the campaigns cialis im internet kaufen.
