Nairobi — As Aids activists concentrate their campaigns in Kenya's urban areas, the uneducated poor living in rural areas have become an easy target for the disease.

The situation is so worrying that the country's director of Public Health and Sanitation, Dr Shahnaz Shariff has called for a shift in the strategies employed in the fight against the disease.

Speaking during the launch of the Kenya Aids Indicator Survey on Thursday, Dr Shariff said such a shift would ensure that NGOs involved in advocacy campaigns preached the right gospel to the right people.

"Our campaign on condom use, for example, has to move to the rural areas if we are to contain this new trend," he said at the Kenyatta International Conference Centre, Nairobi.

More than half of those infected with HIV, the virus that causes Aids, live in Nyanza and Rift Valley provinces, even though overall prevalence rates remain higher in urban than rural areas -- at 8.4 per cent and 6.4 per cent respectively.

The survey polled people aged between 15 and 64 years, and, for the first time, included a 50-54-year-olds segment.

In the Demographic Health Survey of 2003, the prevalence rate among men in rural areas was put at 3.6 per cent, but the figure has increased to 5.3 per cent, a growth of 1.7 percentage points.

The prevalence rate is the number of infected people at one point in time; in this case the percentage of the 18,000 people sampled in the survey carried out between August and December 2007.

Apart from urban-rural migration, the increase in the number of those on anti-retroviral treatment has also been cited as a major factor in the increase in the prevalence. (Aids-related deaths reduce with increased intake of the life-prolonging anti-retrovirals).

An initial report released last year indicated that the national prevalence rate had increased to 7.1 per cent from the 6.7 per cent recorded in the 2003 domestic survey.

This translates to about 1.4 million infections, based on a population estimate of 20.2 million Kenyans aged between 15 and 64.

Nyanza (14.9 per cent), Nairobi (8.8 per cent), Coast (8.1 per cent) and Rift Valley (6.3 per cent) had the highest prevalence rates by province, while Western (5.4 per cent), Eastern (4.6 per cent), Central (3.6 per cent) and North Eastern (0.81 per cent) fell in the lower half.

To militate against the spread of the virus in rural areas, the head of the Aids Control Programme at the Ministry of Medical Services, Dr Ibrahim Mohamed, said new campaigns to increase testing would now focus on home visits and routine tests in hospitals and other health institutions.

This will be boosted by the high number of respondents (83.5 per cent) who said they would be willing to be tested at home.

The report notes that up to 77.9 per cent of Kenyans engage in sexual relations without first establishing the HIV status of the partners, a behavioural trend that puts them at a high risk of infection.

The survey was carried out by government and aid agencies at a cost of Sh400 million.

World Health Organisation country director Dr David Okello said at that cost, the survey was expensive compared to others carried out by the United Nations agency in the region.

"It is a very good study, but we might not be able to sustain it. Let's think about how we can finance it," said Dr Okello.