This archive report was first published on 7 August 2019.
Kenya's blood services are facing a severe crisis following the US government's decision to stop funding the country's blood services in September 2019.
The US President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) has been providing an estimated Sh2 billion annually to support Kenya's blood collection and testing services.
However, the organisation has turned down a request from Health Cabinet Secretary Sicily Kariuki for a six-month extension of the funding.
As a result, the Ministry of Health lacks a backup plan for blood collection and testing, leaving the country's blood services in a precarious situation.
According to Joseph Wang'endo, executive director of the Bloodline Foundation, the total phase out of funding will make it impossible to have screening sites where blood can be screened and tested for HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases.
"The 18 national testing laboratories in the country have run out of automated screening reagent — Abbott 800 — which means we are running a manual platform which has slowed down blood screening in hospitals," he said.
Only two of the six national centres — Nairobi and Nakuru — are currently screening blood, and with the manual process, the centres can only process 270 pints per day, compared with 800 when in automated form.
The country is already facing a chronic shortage of blood, with the collection of blood plagued by lack of money for screening tools and human resources to collect and store blood.
A research project by the emergency medicine and the Ministry of Health shows that while two in five of the hospitals (40 per cent) had a functional theatre, they lacked blood banks.
Dr Wachira Wambugu of Aga Khan University Hospital, who was part of the study, said that without blood, surgeries cannot be performed.
