I have a confession to make. I have been taking antiretroviral
drugs for several years without a...
doctor’s prescription. I am not alone. Almost all non-Muslim Ugandans with some financial means are taking ARVs without first consulting a doctor.
doctor’s prescription. I am not alone. Almost all non-Muslim Ugandans with some financial means are taking ARVs without first consulting a doctor.
Our unregulated
ARV doses are usually administered to us by boys, and increasingly
girls wearing improvised gloves – transparent polythene bags – which
they use to unpluck the hot pieces of roast pork from the skewers in the
smoky joints where we go for the delicacy that is considered haram by
our Muslim brethren.
The pork meat comes from pigs –
as if you didn’t know – which are increasingly fed on ARVs in order to
grow faster to give farmers more profits.
Discovery of
the ARV recipe that supposedly multiplies the rate of a pig’s growth
apparently caused stockouts in public health facilities, and finally
some arrests are now being made.
Hospital staff have
been caught selling ARVs to pig farmers at insanely low prices – an ARV
tablet is currently being sold to a pig farmer at only Ush500, which
equals about 14 US cents. Dear God, why do such things have to happen in
my country?
The supply of ARVs for Ugandan pigs was
boosted this year when hunger hit many parts of the country; apparently,
you just cannot take ARVs when you are hungry. So hungry villagers on
treatment were happy to surrender their lifesaving pills that they could
no longer swallow in exchange for a few shillings to buy food.
Over
a decade ago, when an Aids diagnosis was considered a death sentence,
the cost of ARVs was so high only the richest members of society could
afford them.
Then the American people stepped in with
the President’s Emergency Fund for Aids Relief and together with the
work of the Geneva-based Global Fund, even the poorest people can now
access ARVs.
Maybe that is why people are no longer
worried about the extremely high cost of ARVs, because they are not told
the price that the American and other countries’ taxpayers are paying.
So a guard at a government hospital in Uganda can easily sell you an ARV
tab at 14 US cents after getting it for less from the
storekeeper/pharmacist inside the building.
I am not a doctor but my ordinary understanding makes me suspect that we are treading on dangerous ground.
Taking
in low doses of a drug means introducing that drug into the system,
meaning that should a time come when you actually need the drug, its
effectiveness could have been compromised — that is the layman in me
thinking.
And what about those people already using
the drugs on prescription, should they take in more through pork? Or
should we argue that by giving all pork lovers ARVs we are treating them
in advance, a kind of pre-exposure therapy, in case they happen to get
the virus?
Some medical people tell us of
overmedication, which the kidneys may fail to cope with, as unhandled
toxins end up affecting the liver, while raising the incidence of kidney
disease in Uganda.
So even if the ARVs keep Aids at
bay, the patient’s internal organs may in the long run be affected. So,
as we enjoy our pork in Uganda, we are ingesting other things that our
kidneys and livers may fail to handle.
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