•Less than half of the approximately 3,000 Kenyans with drug-resistant TB have been put on Bedaquiline and Delamanid pills, largely because of their exorbitant cost.
• The report praises Kenya for adopting the quick urine tests (TB LAM tests) for detecting TB in people living with HIV, or who are severely sick.
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Kenya is among few developing countries that have adopted the latest tools to test and treat tuberculosis, a new report shows.
However, these innovations are not reaching most people who need them.
The report, Step Up for TB, released yesterday by health lobbies MSF and the Stop TB Partnership, shows while Kenya is an early adopter it is sluggish in expanding the innovations.
Kenya has already moved to eliminate injectables from the treatment of multi-drug resistant TB regimen to improve treatment outcomes.
However, less than half of the approximately 3,000 Kenyans with drug-resistant TB have been put on Bedaquiline and Delamanid pills, largely because of their exorbitant cost.
Giant pharmaceutical Johnson and Johnson sells Bedaquiline tablets to low- and middle-income countries at $340 (Sh35,000) for a six-month treatment course.
“We finally have better drugs and tests to tackle and prevent this extremely infectious yet curable disease, so it’s both mindboggling and unacceptable that they’re still not being used to save as many lives as possible,” said Sharonann Lynch, senior TB policy advisor for MSF’s Access Campaign.
Bedaquiline comes with fewer side effects in comparison to painful injections currently administered for at least nine months and that can cause irreversible hearing damage, abscesses and kidney dysfunction.
The report praises Kenya for adopting the quick urine tests (TB LAM tests) for detecting TB in people living with HIV or who are severely sick.
The LAM test can be carried out without electricity at the point of care, takes 25 minutes and costs less than Sh350.
A urine-based test improves the chances that a sample can be produced for analysis because about 40 per cent of hospitalised patients are unable to produce a sputum sample but almost all could provide a urine sample.
The report says the Ministry of Health should expand TB LAM for routine use not only in inpatient but for outpatient settings as well.
“As clinicians working on the frontlines of the raging TB epidemic, it is distressing to see the sluggish uptake of TB LAM in national treatment programmes,” said Dr Patrick Mangochi, MSF's deputy medical coordinator in Malawi.
The Ministry of Health in June launched the Kenya Injectable Free Regimens and Latent TB Infection Treatment policies to guide the efforts in ending TB in the country.
Health CAS Dr Rashid Aman said the two policies are key to the ministry’s goal of ridding the country of TB by 2030.
TB is the fifth leading cause of death in Kenya.
“In 2019, we reported and treated 86,504 cases of TB of which approximately 10 per cent are children," Aman said.
In June, World Health Organization country representative Dr Rudi Eggers said: “With these new policies, Kenya has dramatically changed the TB situation among people living with HIV, contacts of TB patients and high risk population as this will ensure latent TB infections are treated and protected from developing active disease."
Edited by Henry Makori