FAULTY HIV TEST KITS IN AFRICA

MBABANE – Just about everybody should get worried after reading this.

Some African countries have received consignments of faulty HIV testing kits from some health agencies.
Reports suggest that two US agencies have acknowledged inaccurate HIV tests in Kenya and several African countries.
“The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, (CDC), however, say the inaccuracies are few with minimal effects on affected populations,” the report read.”

This was in reaction to reports by the charity group; Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) showing dominant HIV kits used in Kenya and four other African countries had failed crucial quality tests.

It was noted that there were increasing cases of HIV misdiagnosis, reaching up to 10.5 per cent in some African countries, something that prompted the organisation to embark on the study.

In 2015, there was a swift recall of hundreds of HIV test kits in neighbouring South Africa following the discovery that they were defective.
This created a ‘well known’ notion that rapid HIV testing could produce either false positive or false negative results.

“There was also the problem of whole batches being faulty. It was for this very reason that, in the case of a positive finding, further testing was done.
“Particularly worrying though were the cases of false negative results, where people had gone home from a hospital or clinic in the belief that they did not have HIV.”

“The US President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) works in five of the sites analysed in the MSF study,” said the US response published on August 31 2018 in the Journal of the International AIDS Society.
The response, which the authors declare as a US government work, said they had analysed the initial MSF data alongside their own information in the five sites and discovered some variation in diagnostic accuracy of the kits (algorithms).

However, they concluded that this had only a very small population-level effect.
In a detailed rejoinder published two weeks ago the US said it had reanalysed the data against its own in the mentioned project areas and concluded the inaccuracies were not significant. The MSF report, which had caused a stir in the global health community, said seven of eight dominant HIV Rapid Diagnostic Tests (RDTs) had failed to meet crucial World Health Organisation (WHO) threshold.

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