Patients may have lost their medicines, c*rds

Raging floods could have swept away the medicines and medical records of hundreds of thousands of Kenyan cancer, tuberculosis and HIV patients, civil society groups have warned.

This is likely to make patients fail to take their medicines as prescribed or miss their hospital appointments.

Another host of vulnerable persons, including the disabled, have had their assistive equipment washed away in the floods. Civil society groups say some people with disabilities now depend on them for help.

“In light of the recent floods, our patients may have lost their medication especially for HIV, TB, family planning, hypertension and diabetes, and appointment cards,” said an alert from a community leader.

The situation is dire, said Stop TB Partnership Kenya Country Lead Evaline Kibuchi. Some patients can’t even recall the treatment regimen they were on, and only know the colour of the tablets they are taking.

Response questioned

“The government therefore needs to put in place systems to ensure that people who are affected by the floods also access their treatment,” Kibuchi told People Daily yesterday, even as Human Rights Watch noted that Kenyan authorities had not responded adequately to recent floods.

Kibuchi appealed to the government to ensure that patients, especially those being treated for cancer, TB and HIV, continue their treatment.

“It’s also important that the government finds a way of restoring the medical records of thousands of patients, because we know some of them have been destroyed in the floods,” she said.

Some patients did not know what disease they were being treated for, relying only on their cards when going to refill their medications, she added.

“When you ask them which drug they were taking, they say they don’t know because most of the drugs are either white or yellow, and that’s what these particular cohorts of patients know,” she said.

“So we want the Ministry of Health to work with disaster management teams to ensure that those who were in treatment [get their medicines] as an emergency.”

Emergency preparedness

The groups wondered why pandemic preparedness strategies developed for  Covid-19 cannot be used to respond to the current emergency caused by floods.

Floods caused by heavy rains have killed at least 300 people, displaced more than 200,000, and destroyed property, infrastructure, and livelihoods across Kenya.

“Kenya’s government has a human rights obligation to prevent foreseeable harm from climate change and extreme weather events and to protect people when a disaster strikes,” said Nyagoah Tut Pur, Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch on the website of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA).

Extreme weather events such as flooding, he wrote, are particularly dangerous for marginalized and at-risk populations, including older people, people with disabilities, the poor and rural populations.