Condom shortage poses threat to anti-AIDS strategy

The government of Tanzania has expressed concern that the country is facing a shortage of condoms, with only a million now in stock - sufficient for one month - although their wide availability is a central plank of national strategy to combat the spread of HIV/AIDS. Deputy Health Minister Dr Hussein Mwinyi told reporters of the condom shortage on Friday as he announced that a consignment of defective condoms returned to the manufacturer last month would be replaced "as soon as possible" with quality ones by the United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA), the Guardian newspaper reported on Saturday. The shortage follows the return of a batch of 10 million condoms, imported by the UNFPA for free distribution across Tanzania, but rejected in April as sub-standard by the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) and the Ministry of Health. The UNFPA announced on 11 May that it would replace the condom shipment intended for use in Tanzania, after a laboratory in the United States confirmed defects in samples submitted for testing. None of the condoms had been released from storage in Tanzania, it added. [see http://www.unfpa.org/news/2002/pressroom/tanzania.htm] An estimated 50 million condoms are used in Tanzania each year, according to the BBC. Tanzania's National Policy on HIV/AIDS, a 45-page document published in November 2001, supports and promotes the use of condoms as a key method of curbing HIV transmission. "Good quality condoms shall be procured and made easily available and affordable," the document states. "The private sector shall be encouraged to procure and market good quality condoms so that they are easily accessible in urban and rural areas." "Condoms are one of the few technologies we have to protect ourselves against HIV/AIDS, and that has to be stressed again and again," Hilde Basstanie, UNAIDS Country Programme Adviser in Tanzania, told IRIN last month. The HIV/AIDS situation in Tanzania - where all data suggest an increasing trend in HIV infection - is demanding serious attention, with recent UNAIDS figures suggesting that, although they represent only 20 percent of the population, Tanzanians between the ages of 15 and 24 account for 60 percent of new infections. In mainland Tanzania, some 12 percent of the sexually-active population is HIV-positive, though there are serious regional variations, according to informed sources. And the HIV/AIDS pandemic - which has now infected about 2 million people in Tanzania - poses a serious challenge to the country's development, undermining the capacity of both public and private sectors to deliver on national development goals, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). In the next five years, the UNDP is to contribute some $3.3 million (to be matched by $2.2 million from the Tanzanian government) to a new collaborative programme against HIV/AIDS, the agency stated. "HIV/AIDS is robbing families, communities, organisations and business of their young and productive people; this is having a disastrous impact on the social and economic development of Tanzania," said Acting UNDP Resident Representative Dr Inyang Ebong-Harstrup. "We can change this only by putting the fight against HIV/AIDS on the top of our agenda - no matter what business we are in," she added.