Kampala, Aug 17 (DPA) Rosemary Bagagga, a penniless AIDS sufferer, is five months pregnant, but what worries her most is that she may not be able to get the drugs she needs to keep her alive.
Two months ago, nurses at a clinic just outside the Ugandan capital Kampala told the 32-year-old mother-of-three and dozens of others that antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) at the health facility had run out.
“I lost hope and fainted,” she told DPA.
“We were warned that we have to be ready for the worst because there may be a total cut off of the drug supplies in the future.”
In recent weeks, some of the 362 health facilities providing ARVs have turned away patients while others have stopped registering new patients altogether.
The government is probing claims that 17 people died during the past two months in the northern district of Kitgum due to lack of treatment.
The East African nation has been one of the world’s worst-hit by the AIDS epidemic, losing around a million people to the disease since the early 1980s. Around 1.3 million people are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Uganda reduced the infection rates from almost 30 percent in the early 1990s to the current 6.4 percent, but numbers of new infections have increased in recent years.
The government announced recently that due to the current global economic crisis, donors such as the Global Fund to fight Malaria, TB and AIDS and the US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) had warned that funds to procure the drugs might be reduced in the future.
However, the Global Fund in early August announced that it had given Uganda over $4 million for ARVs.
“There has been a severe shortage of the drugs in the country,” the organisation’s country director William Paton told DPA. “The funds will cover three months and after that, we will make further considerations.”
But while the Global Fund is putting money in, the government is taking it out.
HIV activists are furious that the government chose to divert $15 million earmarked for ARVs to buy shares in a drug factory and pay health worker wages. They are demanding that the government refund the money.
However, Health Minister Stephen Malinga has instead raised the idea of making patients pay for part of the drug cost.
Such a scheme is not viable for the poor.
“I cannot even feed my children and when I am told that I will have to buy the drugs, where will I get the money?” Bagagga, who was abandoned by her husband, asked.
Christine, 48, another AIDS sufferer from Central Uganda, says that while the drugs were free at first, patients quickly had to begin paying $3 per visit.
“Later, we were told that there were no drugs,” the widower said. “It was like telling us: ‘Go home and die’.”
The end result is that only 190,000 people are receiving ARVs in Uganda out of 357,000 who qualify for treatment, according to the health ministry.
Health charities say that the number of people who qualify may be as high as half a million.
