UN concerned about Malawi's rising deaths of AIDS patients on ARVs

United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis expressed concern on Tuesday over Malawi's rising number of deaths among people receiving HIV/AIDS treatment in the country.

Lewis was speaking at the end of his three-day visit to the impoverished southern African country when he was briefed by Malawian government officials that the country was grappling with an 11 percent death rate of people who were receiving free antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in public hospitals.

Malawi has managed to increase the number of people receiving free ARVs from about 4,000 two years ago to 70,000 at present.

Lewis expressed concern over the high death rate of those people on free ARVs but added that all African countries were faced with the similar problem that must be addressed as quickly as possible.

"Malawi and other countries on the continent are lacking capacity to determine immunity levels of those people on treatment and this is leading to increased deaths of people on treatment," he observed.

The UN special envoy added that poor nutrition was emerging as the single greatest threat to quality life for HIV positive people who were on ARV treatment in Malawi and most sub-Saharan African countries.

He said the United Nations through the World Food Program (WFP) would continue to support governments to provide supplementary food to people on antiretroviral therapy.

On global advocacy, Lewis petitioned the G8 to deliver on promises to increase aid to countries like Malawi so that they could sustain and scale up their HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment and care programs, and achieve the Millennium Development Goal to halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV by 2015.

While in Malawi, Lewis also had the opportunity to appraise himself with the country's Prevention of Mother To Child Transmission (PMTCT) program and appealed for intensified efforts to reduce the high number of children who are born with HIV.

According to the Malawi National AIDS Commission (NAC), up to 30,000 babies born to HIV infected mothers acquire the virus every year, a figure that can be drastically reduced if pregnant mothers are routinely tested during antenatal care and preventive treatment administered.

By 2005 Malawi had a total of 930,000 people living with HIV and 83,000 of them were children under 14 years of age. During the same year, HIV/AIDS killed 86,592 people and 21,118 of the deaths were children below 14 years.

Source: Xinhua