This man needs HIV prevention drugs. Kenai Clinic providing them will soon lose American funding

Ibrahim Loungi lost both her parents due to HIV-related diseases when she was 14 years old. Nairobi native still describes himself as an orphan-now he is 43 years old.

The virus also killed some of his uncles, and the gender, who is gay, believes that he was ahead, it was not for the revolutionary HIV prevention drug. He is capable of using pre-exposure Profilaxis (PREP) for free through clinics in Kenya operated by Manitoba University, which says the clinic serves more than 30,000 customers.

But he may soon lose access to the drug as US President Donald Trump’s administration has taken steps to spend foreign aid, which funds the university’s sex workers’ outreach programs, or SWOP, which has been working in Nairobi since the early 1980s. Employees of the Swop clinic are worried about what it can mean for their customers and for the general canian population.

Larry Gelmon, director of the university program located in Nairobi, said, “They originally edrify us.”

His funding comes from the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar), a global health fund meant that to compete with HIV/AIDS launched by US President George W. Bush in 2003. Tax and expenditure bill Tried to cut $ 400 million for Pepfar in 2026, but That funding was restored Many Republican Senator objected.

Although, New York Times has reported The Trump administration is withdrawing more than half of the Pepfar Fund for the coming financial year. CBC News Pepfar reached the US government to comment about funding, but was not allocated, but did not listen to time to publication.

Drugs and condoms providing programs have had a serious impact on the HIV/AIDS broadcast rate in the country. In the mid -1990s, about 10 percent of Kenyan was living with HIV. By 2023, it was down to 3.2 percent according to UNAIDS, however, the country still has the 11th highest rate of HIV globally.

Other money discovery

Gelmon and his team have come up with a plan to avoid full bandh of all 10 Swop clinics that they run in Nairobi. They will use emergency funds from the university – as a stop gap they try to secure more money.

“Originally, it is keeping three clinics open for three months with three skeletal staff, and again with a skeletal staff keeps our original clinic open for another year,” Gelmon said.

A handful of workers will remain in each clinic, but they say the rest will be closed, already with the notice sent to more than 100 staff members who will go to the end of the month.

As long as clinics do not detect other funding options, patients like LWINGI will only have access to prep by the end of the year. If he could not take the medicine, he did not know what he would do.

“Trust me, if there is no preparation, I am going to be HIV positive,” he said.

“Due to the challenges that I had to face growing up, I didn’t want my son go through the challenge of not being supported by anyone,” Lwingi said, what he was doing as a child.

Gelmon says he has applied for several grants and sent an unwanted funding request to Global Affairs Canada, but he explained that the US funding cut has made “fierce competition” for whatever grant has left.

He says that he was told in an rejection letter to one of the grants, for which he had more than 300 applicants.

Problem with public clinics

Gelmon says that Swop clinics also provide free antiretroviral therapy (ART) to people living with HIV, but will also come in the end. Their customers will be forced to get their medicines from public clinics, which say that they were tarnished in the past.

Gladis installation is a sex worker living with HIV that uses Swop services in a clinic at the eastern end of Nairobi. He is also a colleague teacher.

“They make fun of you,” he said, broke into tears, recalling his upset experiences in the country’s public-health system. “Like, ‘You, how did you get this disease?” ,

Joyce Edhimbo, also a sex worker living with HIV insisted that they are just more than the clinic – they are safe places for this community where people can “gain courage and strength” by speaking about HIV without fear of reprimand.

“Even if you make fun of me, you can’t reverse my HIV position,” he said. “If it was not for this clinic, some of us would have died by now.”

Joshua Kimani, head of clinical services for SWOP, says that these safe places are important because Kenya is a religious country where sex work and uniform-lingo relationships are inserted illegally and illegally-and those values ​​can leak into public health care systems.

“The problem is that the services of the public-health sector are not well funded, and therefore there are many gaps,” he said.

Right now, patients may find free tips on the spot in self -clinics, which may help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections immediately.

Without a clinic, the legend says that sex workers require money to be filled with prescriptions. “To buy drugs for them, they have to sell more sex. And therefore, more infection.”

Gelmon stressed that risky population does not live in a vacuum and can affect others if they become infected.

“By preventing infection in this group, you help protect the large community from infection.”

‘I again Dr. I would not like to be a death ‘

The younger says that he is not giving up hope despite cancellation of his current funding and the fact that he does not guarantee to honor any of the grants of grants for which he has applied.

He has been doing this work in Nairobi since 1993, and says that although he often faces significant challenges and trimming, he has always managed to find some funding.

“We don’t want to go back in 2004 where people were dying like flies,” he said. “At that time we were only signing the death certificate.”

But he says that things have changed over the years, and they do not want to go back to those times.

“I would not like to be Dr. Death again.”