Deep inside the corridors of power, some good things happened in health in 2019. But as Covid-19 atomises our foreign aid, the challenge now is to maintain and increase delivery for millions of our citizens from crippling blindness and diseases. For, finally, in 2019, we stopped neglecting our neglected tropical diseases quite so much.
For sure, our health system has moved in on Elephantiasis over some and even many years. By 2019, the free, preventative and curative drugs granted us for this disease by the pharmaceutical giants were given to 3.81 million of 4.1 million Kenyans needing treatment, equivalent to 93 percent coverage, up from 87 percent the previous year.
But the picture on the rest of our debilitating tropical diseases is far less impressive. Bilharzia is a curse that afflicts our Lake region, but it isn’t confined to the west.
Classed as the most devastating parasitical disease after malaria, it is endemic in Kitui, Machakos, Tana River, and most of Coast. Yet of 1.92 million Kenyans requiring treatment, in 2018, none of them got any. By contrast, in 2019, nearly 400,000 of our school children got bilharzia treatments.
But that still leaves over a million and a half that may be, right now, moving into paralysis on worms that were never treated, which they could have been, with a single free tablet.
For bilharzia sees tiny worm’s eggs consumed that travel to the intestine, liver and bladder, causing anemia, which depletes energy, and malnutrition that knocks out immunity to all other infections and stops physical and brain development. After years, the worms can permanently damage internal organs and even get into the brain and spinal cord, causing paralysis, and seizures. And all that versus getting a single tablet, that’s given free to Kenya.
Likewise, we have been sacrificing a lot of people to blindness through trachoma, in neglect that enjoyed a step-change in 2019. We managed the simple (free) treatment that stops trachoma infections from destroying the eyelids and eyesight for just one per cent of the 3.22 million Kenyans needing treatment in 2018. But in 2019, we treated 1.49 million or 46 percent of them.
Someone deserves some credit for that explosion in healthcare delivery.
But, sadly, Covid-19 has now changed the map again for these diseases. When they are left unaddressed, they move to affect 30 percent or even more of an area’s residents, and infections like trachoma get shared around everyone in the home, through bedding, on clothes. So even once drugs are administered en masse to stop every infection in an area at once, it takes a series of ‘fire-wall’ mass drug administrations to end the public health problem.
Yet, Covid-19 stopped most ‘mass’ everythings, and then took a massive bite out of donor funding for treating these conditions.
In particular, the UK, which was the biggest funder, stopped a programme called ASCEND that was funding £300 million or Sh45 billion of treatments, surgeries, and capacity building for these diseases.
Some of the big philanthropists, notably the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, have stepped in with emergency funding to deliver some key drug rounds this year and next year.
But the funding of surgeries has stopped, leaving thousands blind, and now with little hope of the Sh3,000 surgery to restore their sight and end the pain.
More critically, the funding shake-up has ended the drives by donors to get these diseases moved into the mainstream health system.
The World Health Organisation launched a roadmap at the beginning of this year to get the diseases eliminated by 2030 — that replaced the plan to eliminate them by 2020, which obviously failed.
Even the World Trade Organisation is taking a shot at countries for charging import duties on supplies to treat these diseases. But where is the African Union on this, and most of all, where is our government?
https://www.businessdailyafrica.com/bd/opinion-analysis/columnists/renew-neglected-diseases-fight-3605590
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