Doctors Without Borders have been in Beira, Mozambique since 2014 to assist the country’s frail healthcare system to help curb HIV and Tuberculosis.
As the NGO that provides humanitarian healthcare around the world wraps up its operations in Mozambique’s fourth largest city, Doctor Shehezady Cruz, believes more communication between governments and health services on the ground could save lives.
This is after the Mozambican health department introduced a new HIV drug regimen in 2019, which, according to Cruz, resulted in some HIV drug resistance in about 20% of their patients.
According to Doctors Without Borders, Mozambique has one of the highest HIV prevalence rates in the world. The NGO says around 13% of people aged between 15 and 49 are infected, and 34,000 people co-infected with TB die each year.
Doctor Cruz says following the changing of the HIV drug regime in 2019, to help HIV patients, they realized in some instances the opposite was in fact the case.
“We realized there was a problem with the medication when we started seeing patients that were not improving with the current medication because they had low cd4 counts, and very high viral loads as well as clinical deterioration and had many opportunistic infections and we knew that they had good adherence (to treatment.) and even with this support they continued deteriorating and we saw that there was a need for these genotyping tests to see if these medications were effective and to see what other options (to consider,” says Cruz.
Cruz says by genotyping a procedure to test the efficacy of drugs in patients, they were able to make the necessary interventions.
Doctors Without Border helping Mozambique’s frail healthcare system:
