Kenya: HIV Prevention Pill Harmful, Warn Experts

By Staff Writer

A new 1.7 trillion shillings plan to kick HIV out of Kenya, launched by Health Cabinet Secretary, James Macharia is partially pegged on a controversial daily prevention pill that has been described as a health disaster by experts.

The plan will put commercial sex workers, prisoners, drug injectors and homosexuals on the drug, Truvada, manufactured by Glead Sciences of the US.

The Los Angeles-based Aids Healthcare Foundation has written to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention warning against the widespread use of Truvada in HIV prevention.

The foundation, which in May opened a multi-million shilling regional head office in Parklands, Nairobi, has also embarked on a campaign in the US cautioning individuals, groups and government agencies against a widespread scale-up of the pill.

The organization cites eight studies, one of them carried out in Kenya, showing that healthy people are just not ready to religiously swallow a pill every day to prevent HIV infection, even where they are paid to do so.

"Even where study participants were paid, most did not take Truvada every day as prescribed. As such, we want the public to know that the government-sanctioned scale up appears to be a public health disaster in the making," said foundation President Michael Weinstein in a statement.

Ms. Jennifer Wambua, head of communication at the National Aids Control Council in bid to defending Kenya's plan to scale up Truvada, said they are not planning mass distribution of the pill.

"We are talking of small targeted groups who will be counseled and their progress monitored very closely," she said.

Teams from Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa and USA that included Impact Research Director, Kawango Ogot, analyzed adherence in the Kenyan study carried out in Bondo, Nyanza, Bloemfontein and Pretoria in South Africa.

The study involving 2,120 commercial sex workers had to be stopped halfway because the pill was found to have no effect in preventing HIV infections.

A new study published in the Journal of Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) shows that few participants had taken the drug daily as required hence compromising its effectiveness.

"Ultimately, taking a daily pill for HIV prevention may not be feasible or acceptable for some women at high risk of HIV infection," concluded the team.

The issue came up for debate at the Aids 2014 conference in Melbourne, Australia, in June.

"To knowingly recommend a drug as powerful as Truvada with such serious side effects to be given to people who are perfectly healthy is frightening," said Miki Jackson, an Aids activist.

Experts deem this plan to be an act of desperation on the part of health ministry and which may lead to putting healthy people’s life at risk even more, than they are now. Also, they accused foreign pharmaceutical companies for making Africa a dumping site for their unwanted, untested and uncertified drugs, with many of them using the continents population as lab-rats for their experiments as seen recently in war against the spread of Ebola virus in West Africa, where Zmaap drug by a company in USA is being used.