Kenyan health workers on alert over US funding for HIV/AIDS fight
When Minne Gachau’s husband died from AIDS-related complications in 2006, she was still in denial about being HIV-positive herself – too scared to confide in friends and relatives in her home in Nakuru, a city in Kenya’s Rift Valley.
It was only after the couple’s young son also tested positive and started to receive antiretroviral treatment that Gachau sought the life-saving medication for herself – four years after her initial diagnosis. “(Without it) I would be long dead and forgotten,” Gachau told Openly at a candle-lighting ceremony to commemorate people who have died from AIDS-related illnesses in Nakuru.
Now 47, she has remarried and had another child, who was born HIV-negative, and she works with pregnant women to prevent HIV transmission to their babies.
Gachau is one of the nearly 1.3 million Kenyans who have received HIV/AIDS treatment through a programme launched in 2003 by then U.S.
