Tanzanian Health Record Data indicates Human Rights Violations and Theft of Health Resources harms People Living with HIV/AIDS: PAMOJA protests for Patients

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(Free-Press-Release.com) June 29, 2010 -- Vienna, Austria – June 29, 2010 – The Austrian watchdog organization PAMOJA says that quality of care at Bulongwa Lutheran Hospital, Makete District, Tanzania, has dropped tremendously since the violent interruption of a state-of-the-art Antiretroviral Treatment Program.

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Tanzanian Health Record Data indicates Human Rights Violations and Theft of Health Resources harms People Living with HIV/AIDS: PAMOJA protests for Patients

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In April 2006 People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA) in Makete District, Tanzania, protested against the embezzlements of hundreds of thousands of US dollars designated for health care and community development by the Lutheran Church of Tanzania and its supporting European and North American missionary societies. This widely published outcry of the local community was followed by the temporary closure of a local HIV treatment clinic that treated many of the protesters. Through this move church and hospital authorities actively denied the state-of-the-art treatment for HIV patients at Bulongwa Lutheran Hospital. Since that event, the local self-help group for PLWHA called PIUMA (www.piuma-simba.org) has complained repeatedly about poorly-monitored and late-onset treatment at the re-opened clinic and has counted more than 70 deaths among patients, many of them members of PIUMA.

Randomly collected data from personal health records of 113 patients of the HIV clinic at Bulongwa Lutheran Hospital indicates with high statistical significance that the frequency of important laboratory investigations dropped by a factor of 3.2 and it shows that there are cases where treatment was delayed for months, even years, with no justification or reason. Monitoring of potentially life threatening side effects was poorly performed and patients were not switched to better alternative therapies that are widely available in Tanzania.

“The data we see is fragmentary and difficult to interpret,” says Dr. Chen Lei, a Chinese public health expert, “but it indicates the need for further investigation of the situation and its effects on the patients”.

Dr. Rainer Brandl, a Vienna-based clinician and PIUMA consultant, says, “The data shows that records are not kept properly and that there is a culture of secrecy as well as an intention to prevent further research. The tendency we see in the data goes in the direction of supporting local reports that church employees intentionally keep people away from life-saving treatment”.

PAMOJA demands that the International AIDS Society (IAS) refuse to allow itself and the publicity of the upcoming 18th International AIDS conference in Vienna to be used as a public platform for organizations like the Lutheran Church that claim to be fighting HIV-AIDS while actively deny the human right to basic health care by allowing the embezzlement health resources and the intimidation and mistreatment of patients.

For more information, contact:

Fabian Wirnsperger
Chair, Pamoja, Vienna, Austria
E-Mail: office@pamoja.at
Cell: +43 650 5338827
Website: http://www.pamoja.at/

ENDS

More information can be found online at http://www.pamoja.at/

corruption     hiv aids     human rights violations