ARV treatment in Malawi

When I first got to Malawi I had no idea what ARVs were. To be honest, I’m not ever sure if I’d ever heard the name. But the more time I spend here, and more specifically the more time I spend working at Baylor’s pediatric HIV hospital, the more I realize how important these drugs are for patients suffering from HIV/AIDS.  ARV meds can be the difference between an HIV/AIDS patient living until he’s 80 years old, and an HIV/AIDS patient dying at a very early age because of the disease. Patients who put themselves through regular ARV treatment come across as healthy and happy people. People who don’t have access to this type of treatment can suffer through a slow and painful death.

The whole reason I bring this up is to highlight a piece of news that I just read in the Malawian newspaper this morning. The article informed me that there are currently 250,000 people on regular ARV treatment in Malawi. This may sound like a good number, but when you go digging into the details you’ll realize that this means that only 25% of people living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi are receiving the care they need to survive. You see, the population of Malawi is just over 14 million. And many of the most recent estimates about HIV/AIDS in Malawi suggest that the national prevalence rate is somewhere between 12 and 14 percent. This means that even at a very conservative guess, there are over one million people living with HIV/AIDS in Malawi today. (A more adventurous guess would put that total much closer to two million, around 1.7 if you want to be exact). But regardless of what the total number is, this much is clear – there is a significant number of Malawians infected with HIV/AIDS who are not receiving access to ARV medication. When you consider that in some countries like Botswana and Namibia the ARV coverage rate is between 70 and 80 percent, you can see that a in a country in Malawi where only 25% of people are covered, there is still a lot of work to do.