1 million faulty HIV test kits recalled

January 1, 2012

Saturday, 31 December 2011 00:09 BY AGENCIES

MALFUNCTION: The government has recalled one million faulty HIV test kits.

Photo/File

The government has recalled one million HIV testing kits because of fears about

their accuracy. Dr Shahnaz Sharif, Kenya's director of Public Health and

Sanitation said the World Health Organisation had raised an alert about the kit

after finding half the test results could be wrong. " But there was no reason to

panic as the South Korean-manufactured kit was one of several used to diagnose

the HIV status of people, " Dr Sharif said.

International aids charity Avert says HIV testing has increased sharply in the

past decade following a government-backed campaign to create more awareness

about the illness. In 2000, Kenya had only three voluntary testing and

counselling sites, but the number had risen to nearly 1,000 by 2007, it says.

Dr Sharif said that the Standard Diagnostic Bioline kit, manufactured by a South

Korean company, had wrongly diagnosed people. " The discrepancy rate was about 50

per cent and the WHO has asked all countries to put on hold use of Bioline, " he

said. " About 50 percent of positives may have been reported as negative and 50

percent of negatives as positive. "

He added that WHO had detected the unreliability of SDB, which was widely used

by countries in sub-Saharan Africa. He however said Kenyans should not be

alarmed because the SDB test is one of three tests that health officials carry

out on people to make sure their HIV status is correctly diagnosed. More than

one million Kenyans are HIV positive.

http://www.the-star.co.ke/national/national/55848-1-million-faulty-hiv-test-kits\

-recalled

Comments:

peter

For how long will the poor Africans be at the mercy of some international

organisation whose overall agenda is not so clear yet! We have seen evidence

before of WHO being armtwisted by some pharmaceuticals into declaring swine flu

an epidemic forcing countries to equip millions of tonnes of tamiflu medication

only to admit later that the flu was nothing more than a cold and rendering all

the medical stocks useless!

Its the high time we trained our own doctors not to rely entirely on western

education and try even a mixture of traditional African medicine and modern

medicine. The chinese does it, the Indian, Arabs etc Why is it that we the black

race continue so oblivious of our interests in a world where others are working

round the clock to protect their interests!

How on earth do we expect others with whom we are competing for the scarce

resources, to work towards promoting our interests!

We have to move away from relying on solutions provided by others, to our

own. We must increase funding to research, change our education curricula that

continue to produce millions of half-baked graduates who burden instead of

increasing value to our fledgling economies!

This example shows that had WHO not given this alert we would have continued

to use faulty equipment to test our populace for a disease whose effect even

emotinally has a devastating effect on those affect and inflicted!

Who knows, whether it was a gimmick used by the same pharmaceuticals to sell

us such equipment so that we continue buying ARVs. It is such a shame that our

leaders are completely oblivious of the dangers that these international

institutions pose for us in African and I wonder what useless bodies like AU are

for!

January 1, 2012