Free ARVs give hope to Rakai

Jun 07, 2004

ONLY four weeks after introducing free Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) treatment in Rakai district, 90 people have already started on it. Some of them are reported to be having a magical recovery from their sicknesses.

By Joan Mugenzi

ONLY four weeks after introducing free Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) treatment in Rakai district, 90 people have already started on it. Some of them are reported to be having a magical recovery from their sicknesses.

This response, says Dr. Robert Mayanja the Rakai director of health services, will boost the district whose HIV prevalence rate is 12%, a rate that doubles the national figure.

“The hope is that we are going to have a productive population,” Mayanja said in an interview last week, a day after officially opening the clinic that will provide the service.

“We expect to reduce the number of deaths to AIDS,” he said of the first initiative in the district to provide ARVs to Rakai that has been hard-hit with the HIV/AIDS pandemic in the last two decades.

He says the district has three funders to push 1000 beneficiaries through these drugs that call for a lifetime commitment. Uganda Cares, funded by the American Health Foundation, is expected to cater for 250 patients while the Ministry of Health is to pay for 500 patients.
Mayanja observes that the free ARVs will give people time to plan for the future, but more importantly, it gives them hope.

But to get the clients, Mayanja says, the district headquarters should not work in isolation. “We are targeting NGOs and religious sections to do the mobilisation,” he says. “We have seen it work before, for example with immunisation,” he says.

“The biggest challenge is to meet compliance, that is why we want the NGOs on board. One must follow instructions, if a patient does not comply with the drug usage at least 95% of the time, then, it is as useless as not starting,” says Mayanja.

Some of the organisations which have already come on board to mobolise are World Vision, Medicine de Monde and Kitovu Mobile Home Care.

The writer is a Fellow with the Makerere University IPH/CDC HIV Fellowship programme

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