At the Nyumbani Children's Home in Kenya's capital Nairobi, the facility's staff fear for the future of children with HIV/AIDS as U.S. aid cuts threaten to disrupt their vital drug supply. - REUTERS
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00:00At a children's home in Kenya's capital, Nairobi, children living with HIV-AIDS play.
00:07But the staff here fear for their future, as US aid cuts threaten to disrupt their vital
00:13drug supply.
00:14President Donald Trump's 90-day foreign aid freeze has upended the global supply chain
00:19for drugs to fight diseases including HIV, but it's also blocked the distribution of
00:25drugs that long ago reached their destination countries.
00:29The manager of Nayambani Children's Home, Sister Tresa Palakudi, is concerned about
00:34access to life-saving HIV meds called anti-retrovirals or ARVs.
00:40If you stop ARVs for these children, there is drug resistance, afterwards they will get
00:47all kinds of opportunistic infections, then we lose one by one.
00:55The executive director of the home said that if they start purchasing ARVs, a rough estimate
01:00is $120 per child per month, and that's without other drugs including TB medication and food
01:07supplements.
01:08Meanwhile, on the outskirts of the city, millions of doses of ARVs sit on the shelves of a warehouse,
01:15unused and unreachable.
01:17A Kenya health official said without US funding, distribution of the $34 million worth of medication
01:24sitting there has ceased.
01:26An ex-USAID executive said this stock, which Washington has not released funds to distribute,
01:33includes 2.5 million bottles of ARVs, 750,000 HIV test kits and 500,000 malaria treatments.
01:41In the meantime, Kenya is scrambling to fill the gaps.
01:44We are dependent on Treasury to release funds.
01:47Kenya's health minister, Deborah Barasa, said she expected her government to mobilize funds
01:52to allow the supplies to be released within two to four weeks, but it is not yet clear
01:57whether the government has allocated the money to do so.
02:00Kenyan Christian Charity Med that runs the warehouse and the US State Department did
02:05not respond to requests for comment.