Crisis looms over US blood funds cut

By NASIBO KABALE
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NASIBO KABALE   By NASIBO KABALE
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The US government will stop funding the country’s blood services in a month, putting the critical amenity in a quandary as the Ministry of Health lacks a backup plan for blood collection and testing.

Reliable information indicates that US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) funding will run out in September 2019, for an estimated Sh2b annual support that it has been giving Kenya.

The Nation has also reliably established that the organisation turned down Health Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki’s request for a six-month extension.

A foundation for advocacy on blood services in the country — Bloodline Foundation — is now drawing attention to a looming health crisis.

Bloodline Foundation executive director Joseph Wang’endo said with the total phase out of funding, it will be impossible to have screening sites where blood can be screened and tested for HIV, hepatitis and other diseases.

“The 18 national testing laboratories in the country have run out of automated screening reagent — Abbott 800 — which means we are running a manual platform which has slowed down blood screening in hospitals,” he said.


Only two of the six national centres — Nairobi and Nakuru — are currently screening blood. With the manual process, the centres can only process 270 pints per day, compared with 800 when in automated form.

The information comes at a time when the country is facing a chronic shortage of blood, since the collection of blood has been plagued by lack of money for screening tools and human resources to collect and store blood.

A research project — project 47 — by the emergency medicine and the Ministry of Health and whose data has not been published yet, shows that while two in five of the hospitals (40 per cent) had a functional theatre, they lacked blood banks.

Dr Wachira Wambugu of Aga Khan University Hospital, and who was part of the above study, said that without blood, surgeries cannot be performed.