Plight of Kenyan Child Highlighted.

Nairobi, Kenya

Children with life limiting illnesses in Kenya suffer needlessly due to lack of Palliative care and government policies restricting access to pain reducing medicine, Human Rights Watch has said in new report.

 The 78-page report dubbed Needless Pain: Government Failure to Provide Palliative Care in Kenya released last Thursday reveals how most children in Kenya with terminal ailments such HIV/AIDS or cancer often experience severe debilitating pain due to inability to access palliative care services owing to government policies that restrict access to inexpensive pain medicines and inadequately trained health workers.

With the country’s few palliative care services-a care programme that seeks to prevent suffering and improve quality of life of terminally ill-patients-lacking programmes for children, majority are attended to at home with little support from the low-cost home-based care programmes by health workers who lack necessary training in pain treatment.

 The Kenyan government has erected legal and regulatory barriers to using morphine- an essential medication for treating severe pain- and other medication for treating severe pain, leading to their wide deficit in the country, says the report.  

 Apart from focusing on access to pain medicines, the report recommends for age appropriate psychological counselling to deal with anxiety and depression and integrations of paediatric palliative care into its health system.

 Also it calls for simple reforms on policies by the government to make oral morphine available in all its public hospitals and ensure health care workers are trained in palliative care. So far oral morphine is available in just seven of the country's approximately 250 public hospitals.

The report also revealed negligence on pain treatment from the International donors, with example from the US President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) which spent US$534 million in Kenya in 2009 mostly on counselling hundreds of health facilities, but few have morphine to treat severe pain.

Close to one in every seven children die before their fifth birthday in Sub Saharan Africa-world’s highest child mortality rate, with 4.4 million deaths among the region’s 135 million  children below five years.

 Child mortality remains a problem in Sub-Saharan Africa which according to the United Nations many countries in the region have made little or no progress at all towards reducing by two-thirds child mortality by 2015 as part of the eight Millennium Development Goals for developing nations.

 Washington, US

Sudan a ‘Ticking Time Bomb’-Clinton

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has said that it’s inevitable that the oil-rich southern Sudan would break away and become independent in the 9 January referendum on secession.

Clinton termed the upcoming referendum as a ‘ticking time bomb’ of enormous consequences during a meeting of Council on Foreign Relations last Wednesday. She said that the US, African Union and other international partners are trying to ensure it goes smoothly.

She expressed concern of the south being capable of summoning resources to carry out the referendum and the north is not inclined to do it because it’s evident enough of what the outcome will be.

The next year’s referendum on secession was part of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA) deal signed in 2005 that ended decades of north-south strife.

The Spokesperson for SPLM-Southern Sudan’s main political party-Yien Matthew Chol told Voice of America that despite of promises to implement fully the CPA, Sudanese President Omar Al-Bashir’s National Congress Party (NCP) has consistently blocked efforts to hold the referendum as agreed.

“The SPLM is worried over the current situation that there is no clear move. Even when we sometimes reached agreements with the NCP, they just at anytime run away and cling to the positions which are anti-fair and free referendum,” he said.

The United Nations is expected to base its discussions on Sudan in its General Assembly meeting late this month which US President Barack Obama plans to attend.