New report confirms essential drugs stockouts in South Africa

The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) welcomes the release of the second report of the Stop Stockouts Project (SSP) today at the South African AIDS conference in Durban.

The new report found that one in four facilities had experienced at least one stockout of an HIV, tuberculosis (TB) medicine or vaccine over a three month period toward the end of 2014. This is worse than the one in five found in the previous SSP report. “While it is hard to estimate how much of this variation is due to chance, we can say with some confidence that the overall stockouts situation has either stayed the same or got worse since the previous report,” said the TAC.

A notable positive in the report is that there were very few stockouts (only 75) of the standard first line HIV treatment (the one pill, once a day fixed-dose combination of tenofovir, emtricitabine and efavirenz). There were however frequent stockouts of other first line HIV medicine, second line HIV medicine, pediatric HIV medicine, isoniazid preventive treatment (IPT) for TB, and medicine for complicated TB.

Medicines available but patients not getting scripts fully filled