Reduced funding puts HIV/AIDS care on edge

  Data circulating about HIV indicates that 3.2 million Nigerians live with the virus

The country’s programme for HIV appears floating. For years, it has been largely run with funding from the U.S. president’s emergency plan for AIDS relief (PEPFAR).

PEPFAR invested more than $5 billion as at 2017 to provide antiretroviral treatment for 880,668 people, testing for 7.76 million, care and support for 1.28 million orphans, vulnerable children and their caregivers.

But total funding from PEPFAR dropped from $409.1m in 2016 to $383.6m in 2017. The gain for the programme is a loss for close to a million said to be on treatment across nearly 4,000 facilities that provide services.

“What’s changed is that we are suffering the way we used to suffer,” said Omosehin, the national coordinator of the Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS.

“Responsibility for commodities and logistics at facilities providing services, some of those things we used to depend on has been shifted to the patient. All of these unnecessary charges are barriers to treatment,” he said.

Tests for viral load, CD4 count, blood count costs anything between N2,000 and N3,000 each and some centres tag on  N1,000 every month as patients pick up their drugs, with patients racking up N12,000  for drug pickup at the end of the year.

Bills of N500 and N1,000 might be considered affordable but many people living with HIV have already seen their finances battered.

“And when you look at the economic situation of the country, even those who are negative are unemployed. How much can we cry as persons living with HIV if the people who are negative don’t even have, not to talk of those of us living with HIV,” said Omosehin.

Some facilities demand payment for every chemistry and hematology evaluation and tests can be up to three times a year, depending on a doctor’s judgment, he added.

“For an individual who has Ebola, you can’t say they should come to pay for treatment. It is a public health concern. If that individual goes back home because of charges, because of even N50, he is going to transmit the infection to a whole lot of communities. The same thing is applicable to HIV. If we are going to put the epidemic under control we shouldn’t attach any charges.”