World News

Compiled by Martin Flynn

Displaced Kenyans now not getting the HIV treatment they need to survive.

‘Kenyan civil war fuelling HIV crisis’

Thousands of Kenyans uprooted by the ongoing ethnic and tribal violence in the country are not now getting the vital HIV medicines they need to survive.

Hundreds of thousands of people have fled the killings and attacks over the last three months. Many thousands of these displaced people are HIV positive, many in hiding and missing treatments because local health clinics are closed, or because they are too afraid to make the journey.

“We don’t know where our patients are,” Florence Muli-Musime, deputy director of the Kenya Medical and Research Foundation, told Reuters. “We had a very good a very good tracking system using our contacts in the community, but this has now broken down.”

The United Nations have warned that without adequate water, nutrition and sanitation, people living with HIV risk opportunistic infections and rapid disease progression.

And HIV transmission risks are even higher in areas where sexual attacks on women and children are occurring.

A UNICEF report suggested that desperate women and girls in Kenya are now trading sex for food, protection and transportation, further increasing their exposure to the disease.

“HIV patients are receiving sub-optimal treatment, and because tuberculosis is not diagnosed, it is not treated,” said Dr Ian Van Engelgem, of Medicins San Frontieres: “It is a very explosive cocktail.”

UNAIDS estimated that there are a million Kenyans living with HIV, with only 165,000 receiving antiretroviral drugs. With interruptions in this treatment now occurring the number of deaths from HIV and Aids in the country in the next few years is set to rise, they say.

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