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Agony as personal details of HIV/Aids patients leak to the public

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 Patients in Uganda will have to deal with the agony of having their details public Photo:Courtesy

Having HIV/Aids in Uganda must be more difficult than carrying this terminal illness in any other country. Swallowing daily pills for the rest of your life, yet knowing that whatever the case, the whole thing will end in death unless a boda boda crash or a collapsing building kills you first must be bad enough.

But as if suffering with a terminal illness is not bad enough, now Ugandans living with HIV have to contend with the horror of the entire public knowing not only about their status, but the details of the treatment they are been undergoing as well.

And it is all courtesy of the petty greed of staff at the super-modern Aids treatment facility in the city suburbs which has been operating now for close to two decades. It is a centre of excellence of sorts, and hundreds of experts from all over the works have visited the facility to see Uganda's much-touted Aids management initiatives and capabilities.

All the records of the patients – they are actually called 'clients' who have been to the facility for close to two decades have been existing in files on paper in addition to soft copies, presumably. And some staff at the facility apparently needed some pocket money and decided to sell all these documents to some fellow who makes small paper bags in which market vendors pack potato chips, pancakes and small amounts of onions and tomatoes.

According to local media, market vendors were buying a kilo of these documents at 300 Uganda shillings, which is slightly less than ten Kenyan shillings.

Yes, for ten Kshs, a vendor gets to access all your HIV management history, complete with the day you started treatment, what the CD4 count was and how it has been progressing, the viral load which had been periodically measured and the kind of medicines that have been administered to you over time.

And how many sheets can be found in a kilo? Five hundred? One thousand? Statistical information on all those people all available for ten Kenyan shillings! And worst of all, their names are all there, not in some form of code but the real name as you were born, baptized, graduated, employed and known by in your neighbourhood and social circles!

The scattering of patients' confidential information in the market places literally, in Kampala, just goes to show the shambolic state of the management of the health sector. I guess now you are no longer surprised that an ancient cancer radiotherapy machine that broke down at Mulago hospital cannot be replaced and now Kenyan hospitals are graciously offering to treat Ugandan patients with radiotherapy free of charge.

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