Kenya losing the fight against HIV after all, experts warn

• A three per cent rise in prevalence rates came as a shock because Kenyans were of the opinion that Aids pandemic had been contained.
• 2007 KAIS study show prevalence rates in the national population at 8 per cent, an almost four point increase.
• Government has been discussing and agonising on the authenticity of the results and how to make them public.
• KAIS findings raise some pertinent questions about what is really going in the HIV and Aids field.

One of the explanations the government officials are to put forward is that as more people access anti-retroviral drugs, lives are prolonged, with the number of deaths decreasing.

And since prevalence measures the number of people living with HIV and Aids at a particular point in time, then the high prevalence is justified.

The other reason is that those taking ARVs have regained their health and are having more sexual partners than before.

Indeed, experiences from elsewhere are showing that some of those on these drugs and good nutrition have very low viral loads, which make them think they have low chances of HIV transmission, hence engaging in unprotected sex.

Even with these explanations, the Government is not done yet. It is understood the United States through Usaid, which funds the production of the KDHS, will not finance the HIV component of the next study after spending over Sh400 million on KAIS.

From the donor’s point of view, the KAIS findings should be sufficient for the 2008 KDHS.

But the Government insists they have to undertake another similar study to, among many other things, confirm if indeed the KAIS study findings are correct.

Senior government officials and the ministries of Health, Special Programme and Finance have been asked to source funding from donors and other sources to finance this study expected to start in October.

For now, the KAIS findings raise some pertinent questions about what is really going in the HIV and Aids field. A Global Aids report was also being launched in New York last evening but the United Nations and was not expected to differ from the KAIS.

Gradually decreased

The United Nations started to revise its estimates in light of the new studies in its 2004 report, reducing the number of infections in Africa by 4.4 million. It also gradually decreased the overall infection rate for working-age adults in sub-Saharan Africa from nine per cent in a 2002 report to 7.2 per cent in its latest report.

The warning on reliance on ambiguous statistics was raised much earlier by the Kenya Aids Watch Institute. In its web site, it argues: “Listen carefully to the statisticians, who always insist that it is impossible to know the exact number of people living with HIV and Aids, and that the best use for surveillance statistics is identification of trends over time, rather than ‘correction’ of prevalence levels.

“The war on Aids must move from rhetoric over erroneous prevalence figures. A real solution will be built on the solid foundation of truth,” says KAWI director Francis Kajumo.

Some experts say that tallying HIV cases is not as important as finding the resources to fight the disease. But to researchers who drive Aids policies, differences in infection rates are not merely academic.

Programmes deemed successful are urged on and funded lavishly by international donors, often to the exclusion of other projects. Hence the need to be seen to be succeeding.