One in five South African health care centers experience ARV stock shortages

South Africa’s Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has warned that the country’s HIV treatment program is being threatened by stock shortages of life-saving medicines.

Some 20% of the 2,139 health facilities responding to the largest ever national survey of its kind – conducted by the Stop Stock Outs Project during September and October 2013 – reported antiretroviral (ARV) and/or tuberculosis (TB) medicine stock outs or shortages.

Anele Yawa, TAC national chairman, said: “For people on ART who are forced to interrupt treatment and are left without medicine, this situation is nothing short of a national and provincial crisis, felt on a very personal level. The extent of medicine shortages, especially ARVs, is significant and far beyond previous estimations. In six out of nine provinces over 17% of responding facilities said they were affected.”