Patients are being turned away from testing centres and hospitals in the city because of dearth of HIV testing kits for first round of tests

For a facility that conducts at least a hundred HIV tests daily, the civic-run KEM Hospital has not done a single one in the past five days.

The reason being a shortage of rapid kits-1, required for the preliminary tests done for detecting HIV (see box).
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All major government- and civic-run hospitals are almost on the verge of running out of stock, officials revealed.

Reliable sources told MiD DAY that the shortage was evident two months ago, when the Mumbai District AIDS Control Society (MDACS) had alerted the hospitals to use the available stock sparingly.
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In a bid to continue the testing in major hospitals such as KEM, MDACS had even revoked the kits from smaller integrated counselling and testing centers (ICTC) in the city, but the shortage persists.

The MDACS is responsible for distributing the kits to the 89 ICTCs in the city.

Why no kits

Dr S Kudalkar, project director, MDACS, said, "The National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) supplies us the kits and we distribute them among the ICTCs.

We have not received the stock from NACO and thus the shortage. We have already told the hospital to use the kits only with high-risk patients until the new stock arrives."

However, NACO officials said, "In the last year, NACO has been encouraging more people to undergo testing. So the number of tests performed have increased and thus the centres are running low on stock."

It's not only the increased awareness-induced testing. Officials at NACO blamed shortage on the delay in the appointment of a new inspection agency.

"The supply NACO receives from the company that won the tender after an international bidding process has to be inspected by an agency.

This year, a new agency had to be appointed, and the process took a lot of time," said a NACO official requesting anonymity.

MiD DAY had earlier reported ('HIV testing kits damaged on arrival', December 2, 2010) about the kits that got spoilt because of lack of proper cold storage.

Incidentally, other states including Gujarat, Karnataka and West Bengal have complained of a similar shortage of kits.

Hospitals speak

Officials confirmed that the paucity of kits has hit hospitals and is affecting patients. Dr Preeti Mehta, head of the microbiology department at KEM, said, "We are turning away patients, and in this situation we cannot refer them to other centres as they too are facing a shortage. We have intimated the MDCAS about this," she said.

An official at JJ Hospital, said, "We have intimated our dean about the shortage and he assured us that the hospital would procure kits of the same standard from its own funds so patients do not suffer."

While government run hospitals have provisions for such a fund allocation, civic hospitals do not.

Dr Kudalkar of MDACS said that the stocks would be available in a week's time. "We have informed NACO about the shortage of kits in Mumbai, because of its dense population," he said.

25,000
The number of HIV tests performed in the city at various testing centres every month