The Independent Uganda: You get the Truth we Pay the Price
Kampala, Uganda | THE INDEPENDENT | The move by United States President Donald Trump to order a suspension of US foreign aid that came with a funding halt on HIV treatment has come with wide misinformation about drug access. This has caused fear and could turn away clients from picking their refills affect their progress in care and endanger their health.
Speaking to URN on Friday, Dr Benard Michael Etukoit, Executive Director at TASO said they had seen a lot of false alerts on social media claiming that their clinics had purportedly closed and yet all their eleven clinics that offer Anti-Retroviral (ARV) treatments remain open.
He says while the freeze had some of their staff sent home until the ninety days freeze is lifted, critical staff including those dispensing medicines have remained at work and have enough refills to last them three months.
Earlier, Flavia Kyomukama who lives with HIV had told URN that the real fear and the assumption in the community is that those living with HIV can’t get any medicine at all from what they are seeing in the media.
As a result of this, she notes, there are individuals she had spoken with who had immediately resorted to rationing their drugs as a way of safeguarding themselves from looming stockouts.
“They don’t know what’s going on. Because they’ve heard grants were cancelled, they won’t go to the facility to check if they can get some medicine. Some have decided to skip some days without medicine because they fear stocking out.
Dr Yvonne Karamagi, the Executive Director at Mildmay Uganda reveals that they continued to receive complaints that their Entebbe-based ART clinic had closed and yet their treatment programme is currently not funded by the United States.
As a way of countering the high rates of misinformation, Etukoit says they are considering running media announcements urging clients to continue picking their medications. He however says the idea of closing TASO does not suffice as they have active funding for other projects considering that the entity is the country’s principal recipient of Global Fund grants in Uganda.
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