09 Oct 2024

Botswana is moving into the three new tier HIV testing algorithm, says National Health Laboratory chief medical scientific officer, Ms Julia Ngidi.

Briefing the United States Ambassador- at-large, Dr John Nkengasong, in Gaborone on Monday, Ms Ngidi said they had acquired a fourth-generation test kit that would  serve as a key component of the updated testing protocol.

She emphasised that, in addition to HIV testing, Botswana has introduced tests for other sexually transmitted infections, including syphilis, hepatitis B, and hepatitis C. These services will be available at key population and antenatal care (ANC) testing centers.

Highlighting Botswana’s commitment to advancing health initiatives, Ms Ngidi noted that the Botswana-Harvard Collaboration Centre was designated a World Health Organization (WHO) collaborating center for HIV drug resistance in August 2023.

This designation, she said  aligned with Botswana’s focus on three main objectives: conducting routine testing for HIV drug resistance, assisting in surveillance testing both domestically and in other African countries, and providing training for other nations to implement their own drug resistance testing protocols.

She further said part of the requirements for collaborating centre was that they needed to carry out surveillances and work in collaboration with Botswana Harvard Partnership (BHP), Botswana-University of Maryland School of Medicine Health Initiative (BUHMMI) and Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in the country, to ensure they completed the surveillances.

Ms Ngidi mentioned that while the Integrated Behavioural and Biological Survey (IBBS) surveillance has been completed, therewas a need for additional technical assistance and data utilisation.

She said they also needed assistance to expand the National Quality Assurance Laboratory to enable them to provide proficiency testing material for HIV and other tests including viral load, as they depended on other countries to get materials. Ms Ngidi said they needed to include other pathogens and were looking to do Hepatitis B and C, to give them national data.

For his part, Specialised Health Services acting secretary, Dr Tshepo Machacha said that through PEPFAR and CDC Botswana support, the Ministry of Health laboratories had managed to accredit nine laboratories across the country.

Dr Machacha said the ministry had set up a responsive infrastructure across the country where every district was able to test for HIV viral load and CD4 with laboratory capacity exceeding the national demand. He said the laboratory personnel had been trained on quality assurance and laboratories across the country were renowned for quality services.

However, he said that despite the commendable work, there was still work to be done as they focused on sustainability of the gains they had made.

In response, Dr John Nkengasong said Botswana was one of the first countries to achieve 95:95:95 through shared leadership. Dr Nkengasong said that reflected sustained partnership as the United States was not transactional when it came to global health and was the number one global health partner.

“We invest about US$10 billion (around P132.4 billion) per year in Africa to support Malaria programmes, TB, HIV, global health and others,” he said.

He also said they invested US$2.6 billion ( P31.8 billion) in the Southern and Eastern African countries in 2023 in support of HIV and health security programmes. ENDS