No condom shortage in country - Government says

The government has refuted claims of condom shortage in the country.

According to Director, of Medical Services, Preventive Health Andrew Mulwa there is a good number of condoms in the country and distribution is ongoing.

Speaking during the pre-world AIDS Day on Wednesday, Mulwa said the whole HIV/AIDS medical supply chain was disrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic but the government is already working on logistics.

He however noted that there is no one given time that the country will have all the condoms it wants.

“We are working on a resource-limited environment, we require about 400 million Condoms per year, and what we have now is about 50 million condoms," he said.

He also noted that they are still checking on the quality of the condoms as some of the batches were found not to have met the required standards.

About the HIV/AIDS Viral load testing kits, Mulwa stated that they are also available in the country and testing has resumed.

“We had a challenge with viral load testing kits from last year to March this year, but from March this year we have resumed testing," he noted.

He added:

“We had a backlog, we had some samples that we had collected some five or six months prior, these are the ones we have been testing and once the backlog is done we should be returning to normalcy by the end of next Month."

Mulwa was responding to concerns raised by a Civil Society group claiming that there was a looming condom shortage across the country ahead of the Christmas festive season.

In a press briefing on Monday, AIDS Healthcare Foundation Kenya County Director Samuel Kinyanjui said that counties affected most by the shortage are the lakeside counties, Nairobi and Nakuru.

Kinyanjui stated that a total of 455 million condoms is demand in the market annually, compared to 150 million that are being distributed by the government.