Read in full: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-disease/the-hiv-pa...
SELECTED EXTRACT:
'Why are full bottles of lifesaving ARVs – which campaigners fought for years to make affordable and accessible in Africa – lying discarded on the roadside?
The answer is stigma.
‘You give them meds... they throw them away’
In the West, the term has become little more than a buzzword. But in parts of sub-Saharan Africa, where life is fragile, to be stigmatised is to bear a permanent scar – one that can make the difference between life and death.
Pervasive myths, including the belief that people with HIV can spread the virus to others just by sitting in the same room or handling food, remain common in rural villages surrounding Nkhoma and have done since the HIV conspiracy theories of the early 1980s.
Despite years of campaigns aimed at dispelling such myths, a positive result can still result in job loss, divorce, eviction. In a country where over 70 per cent survive on less than $0.93 a day, such ostracism can be a death sentence in itself.
So the white pill bottles – instantly recognisable in a country where HIV is so widespread – are too risky for some patients to bring home.
“You give some people the meds, and on their way home, they throw them away. They come to the next visit and tell us they’ve taken all their tablets. But they have not,” Jacqueline, who has been a nurse at Nkhoma, the rural mission hospital that sits in the shadow of the surrounding mountains since 2017, told The Telegraph.
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org
