Govt fears reports could hurt HIV testing in Kenya

NAIROBI, Tuesday

Kenya's Health Minister expressed concern on Monday that people could be put off from taking AIDS tests because of reports that high error rates meant some people had been wrongly diagnosed as carrying the virus.

The media reports stemmed from an October study which found a high error rate in the single use of rapid HIV tests, Health Minister Beth Mugo told reporters.

"These media reports have caused anxiety and may have a negative impact on the ongoing campaign aimed at encouraging Kenyans to know their HIV status," she said.

Rapid HIV tests are widely used in poor countries as they are cheap, easy to use and produce results within half an hour.

Health experts in places such as Kenya recommend using at least two different rapid tests to ensure against false positives.

But a report published in the East African Medical Journal in October, which hit headlines in the Kenya's leading dailies over the weekend, found that using a single rapid test to diagnose HIV was likely to provide a false positive result.

Reassure public

This could mean healthy people are mistakenly told they are infected with HIV if centres did not adhere to national testing guidelines, the study found.

While the report did not assess whether centres were following guidelines, the report was enough to scare Kenyans and force officials to reassure the public testing was accurate.

Health Minister Mugo and Omu Anzala of the University of Nairobi, who helped write the study, told a press conference on Monday that Kenya's policy was to use serial testing with three different test kits.

Whether all centres were following the guidelines was not clear, Anzala said. "There was a tendency in some quarters to rely on a single test," he said.

Millions of people visit HIV testing centres in Kenya and east African neighbour Uganda each year.

More than 5 million Kenyans have so far been tested for HIV, with 1.4 million adults infected, according to NASCOP, Kenya's National Aids/STD Control Programme.

The UN estimates Uganda has 1 million adults infected with HIV or 6.7 percent of the total adult population.

Sub-Saharan Africa has 22.5 million people with HIV who make up 68 percent of the global total, according to UN figures. (Reuters)