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| An assistant at the Etoug-Ebe Baptist Hospital, a subsidiary of the Cameroon Baptist Convention Health Services, takes a blood sample of a patient participating in the Novartis Access program to fight non-communicable disease. Photo: Anne Mireille Nzouanekeu |
This was originally published on the Huffington Post on October 30, 2017.
Communicable diseases like HIV/AIDS and malaria have taken a
terrible toll on Kenya and other African countries over the last 20 years. In
2010, an
estimated 51,000 Kenyans died from AIDS but that number has declined
steadily, to 36,000 in 2016. Kenya is now considered an
HIV success story. The same is true in many other countries.
Now there is a new epidemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs)
that is rising just as the world is starting to get a handle on communicable
diseases, according to the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation. The
Institute reports that the largest contributors to the loss of healthy life
are now high blood pressure, smoking, high blood sugar and excess
body weight.
But Dr.
Samuel Mwenda, who knows a thing or two about both epidemics, believes
there are lessons we have learned in the fight against communicable diseases
that can now be applied to NCDs. Mwenda is general secretary and CEO of the
Christian Health Association of Kenya (CHAK), a network of Protestant health
facilities in Kenya. CHAK now supports 46,000 people living with HIV with
antiretroviral therapy, representing about 9 percent of the total number of patients
nationally.
In 2015, CHAK turned its attention to NCDs: With the support
of Novartis
Access, it began offering a portfolio of 15 products to treat
cardiovascular disease, diabetes, respiratory illness and breast cancer at a
price to governments, NGOs and other institutional customers not to exceed
$1.00 per treatment per month. Since then, Novartis Access has also started working
in Cameroon, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Rwanda and Uganda.
