Ugandan Health Ministry Reassures Over Availability of AIDS Drugs

Text of report by Anthony Bugembe entitled “Health ministry promises enough ARVs” published by state-owned, mass-circulation Ugandan daily The New Vision website on 6 September

The Ministry of Health has assured People Living With HIV/AIDS (Plha) that the shortage of Anti-Retroviral drugs (ARVs) will soon be history.

“We have averted the situation,” Dr Nathan Mugisha, the acting health ministry permanent secretary [PS], said. “One of our suppliers started delivering on Tuesday [2 September]. We are also expecting a consignment from the Clinton Foundation within 10 days. Very soon this worry that we may run short of ARVs will not still exist,” added Mugisha.

According to the ministry’s ARV stock status report (19 June-19 August), central stores had no stocks for all the ARVs and had placed several orders. Appearing on Vision Voice’s News Maker programme yesterday morning, Mugisha noted that the shortages were not in all ARVs.

“We are experiencing some shortages in one of the drugs we use for second line treatment for adults and syrup formulations for children,” he said People Living with HIV and AIDS only resort to second line treatment after the first one fails or when they react to it.

“We don’t have stock outs in the health facilities. We only have stock outs at the national level (stores). So the patients still have medicines but, of course, we need to have enough stock at the national and facility levels to be sure that the patients will not run out of drugs,” Mugisha added.

However, some Plhas told Saturday Vision that the amount of drugs they receive from some ARVs sites had been reduced drastically over the last one month.

The PS said: “I can confidently say the patients still have ARVs and that we are doing our best to ensure that there will be no body without ARVs at any one time. By the time the ARVs that are with the patients are over, we should have enough to restock their prescriptions.”

The strategy is to have a drug stock in the national stores to last two to six months to avert a possible crisis in case of delays in procurement, the acting secretary said.

Originally published by The New Vision website, Kampala, in English 6 Sep 08.

(c) 2008 BBC Monitoring Africa. Provided by ProQuest LLC. All rights Reserved.