Kenya: Children Dying of Needless Pain

By Henry Neondo

Nairobi, Kenya---Shortage of morphine, poor training and lack of palliative care services contribute to the painful deaths of 12 per cent of Kenya’s children annually.

Juliana Kippenger, a children’s rights researcher at the Human Rights Watch said in Nairobi last week that children with incurable diseases such as cancer and HIV/AIDS are suffering needless pain occasioned by the short supply of oral morphine, a WHO recommended drug for chronic pain.

“Although the drug is cheap, at Ksh250 (US$3.12) per 100ml, the drug is in short supply and even when available, it can only be found in 7 hospitals in Kenya that do offer palliative care services”, said Kippenger.

According to Dr Zipporah Ali, the National Coordinator of the Kenya Hospice and Palliative Care Association, although the national medicine policy calls oral morphine essential---meaning it should be a priority for public procurement and available to district and sub-district hospital facilities, the 1994 licit and illicit law and the narcotics law has continued to focus on the illegal uses of morphine making possession of it illicit and punishable.

“This is the major problem”, concurs Cathy Otieno of Laborex, an importer of the Oral Morphine. She says that even when suppliers stock the drug, medics would not prescribe it for fear of being apprehended for dealing with a proscribed substance. “There is thus the danger that the morphine used in the country is often expired”.

Dr Ali adds that another challenge is that medical colleges hardly train students on pain management, only spending two hours of their four years in college to learn a bit of it.

Kenya has close to 150, 000 children living with HIV, of who only around 30, 000 receive ARVs.