The number of Aids patients in Kenya reached 1.4 million in 2007 despite numerous interventions, a new survey has shown.

The new numbers now puts pressure on the Government and private organisations to seek more funds for caring of newly-infected people. In 2006, 1.2 million Kenyans were HIV positive.

"More than 1.4 million Kenyans living with HIV is not a positive thing. This figure is high," said the director of Medical Services, Dr Shahnaaz Sharif.

The survey released yesterday shows an increasing trend of prevalence among young adults and pensioners and it is likely to increase Treasury's burden to allocate more funds to care for people living with the disease.

Already, more than Sh6 billion of government and donor funds is spent every year on the scourge and any further allocations could strain the budget of the Ministry of medical services.

"We have also devoted a lot of manpower to the care of people living with HIV and this is straining services in other key medical areas," said Dr Nicholas Muraguri, head of National Aids Control Programmes.

Affected areas

According to the Kenya Aids Indicator Survey carried out from 2007, the prevalence of HIV has not declined since the last survey in 2003 as most people infected now live in rural areas.

Nyanza, the Rift Valley and Nairobi provinces are the most hit regions with 60 per cent of people living with HIV living in those areas. The Aids Indicator survey combined interviews and laboratory blood testing of respondents.

The survey provides direct measurement at population level of HIV prevalence and access to treatment and care, as well as indicators relevant to prevention.

The survey was conducted from August 2007, with 10,000 households in the eight provinces. About 16,000 respondents gave blood samples for lab testing. HIV prevalence for adults aged 15-64 years was 7.1 per cent.

Three out of five people living with HIV are women. Five per cent of those infected are aged between 50 and 64 years. The Ministry of medical services says lack of knowledge of HIV status is the biggest obstacle to treatment and care.

According to the report, 80 per cent of the 1.4 million Kenyans living with HIV knew their status during the survey.

Meanwhile, two UN agencies said promising results with an experimental Aids vaccine in Thailand gave "new hope" in the fight against the disease, but more work was needed to see if it could be used elsewhere.

The vaccine tested on volunteers is a combination of Sanofi-Aventis's ALVAC canary pox vaccine and the failed HIV vaccine AIDSVAX.

The vaccine lowered the risk of HIV infection by 32 per cent among 16,000 heterosexual Thai volunteers who had no special risk of Aids infection, the US and Thai government researchers said.

"It remains to be seen if the two specific vaccine components in this particular regime would be applicable to other parts of the world with diverse host genetic backgrounds and different HIV subtypes driving different regional sub-epidemics," the WHO and UNAIDS said.