AFFORDABILITY OF ANTIBIOTIC THERAPY OF BACTERIAL OPPORTUNISTIC INFECTIONS IN HIV/AIDS
Otor Paul Onah*, Pharm D, FPC Pharm
ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: Opportunistic infections are a common occurrence and lifetime risk in persons living with HIV/AIDS. Many experience repeated episodes of either new infections or reactivation of latent infections. Bacterial opportunistic infections before the introduction of HAART were the most commonly encountered and their clinical presentation, severity and frequency depend on overall level of immunity. Antibiotics affordability remains an issue of concern to clinicians. In most poor resource settings patients pay for non HAART drugs, so non-affordability will result in non-adherence and poor clinical outcomes. METHOD: This cross sectional retrospective study was carried out in General hospital Asokoro Abuja, using prescription records from September 2012 to September 2013.
Information on antibiotic used was extracted from the medical records of patients for analysis. ANALYSIS: Data of antibiotic prescriptions was collated, numbered, coded and entered into Microsoft excel which is then loaded into SPSS 20 for descriptive and inferential statistics. RESULTS/DISCUSSION: The mean age of patients was 38.2±5.2 and the most common bacterial opportunistic infections were lower respiratory tract infections (26.2%) is higher than 16.5% reported earlier. Patients were prescribed an average of 2.8±0.8 antibiotics per prescription with a mean duration of therapy of 15.8±6.3 days. The average number of drugs per prescription of 6.81 is much higher than 3.04 reported, which is due to multiple drug regimens for HIV/AIDS management. Patients pay between 200 -500% of international reference prices of antibiotics and innovator brands cost up to four times more than generics. CONCLUSION: Current antibiotic therapy for the common bacterial infections is generally unaffordable for most patients. Non affordability of antibiotics poses great risk in not only its negative impact on morbidity and mortality, but also on development of bacterial resistance.
Keywords: HIV/AIDS, Affordability, Opportunistic infections, Antibiotics, Prescriptions.
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