The alarming number of Nigerians who are living with the deadly HIV and who are not even on treatment, has been unveiled.
It has been revealed that no less than 2.3 million Nigerians living
with the Human Immunodeficiency Virus are not on any form of treatment
even as health experts have raised alarm over the growing incidence of
resistance to Anti-retroviral drugs in the country.
Vanguard reports that a professor of Haematology and Transfusion
Medicine at the College of Medicine, University of Lagos, Professor
Suleiman Akanmu, while disclosing this yesterday in Lagos, said only
900,000 persons living with HIV in the country are currently on a
treatment programme as against the estimated total number of 3.2 million
persons nationwide.
Akanmu, who is also the Chairman, National Task Team on
Antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Nigeria, spoke during a joint
stakeholders’ Summit with the theme: “Drug Resistance Monitoring, Early
Infant Diagnosis and Viral Load” organised by World Health Organisation,
WHO, blamed the development on inability to carry out routine viral
load test, as well as unavailability of second and third line drugs to
treat HIV.
“Many of our patients that are on first line drugs are failing
and they are supposed to be put on second line drugs which is not
available now. Also we are not detecting failure on time, if you have
about 900,000 Nigerians on first line drugs, we do not know how many of
them have failed the first line regimen because we do not routinely
carry out viral load test to show that while on drugs, the virus is
still detectable in them.
“If we have facilities in Nigeria where people can easily do
viral load test, then we would be able to detect first line failure and
be talking about putting them on second line regimen,” he argued.
Äkanmu, however, called for more research and support for
laboratories in the country to effectively carry out viral load test and
when detected there should be enough drugs to put them on second line
regimen.
“Research is key, in other parts of the world, before you put a
patient on ART, they normally do drug resistance testing to know what
type of drug the individual is sensitive to before applying the drugs,
but that is not feasible in our situation.
“If we are going to prevent viral resistance from evolving,
then we must ensure that the virus does not replicate, because the
resistance is coming from the ability of the virus to replicate, so we
must administer drugs that do not allow the virus to replicate itself”.
At the forum, the WHO country representative, Dr Wondimagegnehu
Alemu expressed the global health body commitment to produce guidelines
that will help countries to improve surveillance of drug resistance as
well as monitor and detect it in a public health setting.
Alemu who was represented by the WHO vocal point for HIV/AIDs, TB,
Malaria, Dr Rex Mpazanje said that drug resistance are inevitable but
the important thing for countries was to minimize the impact of that
resistance to the programme outcome.
“The challenge in Nigeria is that there have been load of works
done in drug resistance but to large extent these have not been
properly coordinated at national level. We have several initiative been
done but there is no opportunity to disseminate it to everybody, so we
are using this meeting to bring together expertise to disseminate what
they have doing in term of drug resistance. Presently Nigeria is doing
well as they always follow the WHO guideline on which drugs to use.”
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