“I wish we could just walk into a pharmacy and buy a cheap self-testing kit like we do with pregnancy or HIV,” she said as she left the clinic in a working-class township of Harare. “It would be much easier.”
Perhaps the biggest obstacle to making inexpensive, self-tests widely available in the developing world is that the World Health Organization has yet to issue guidance on their use. Without the resources of wealthy countries to buy tests or evaluate their safety, poor countries must wait for WHO approval before aid groups and international agencies are willing to donate them in large numbers.
Baker and other experts have estimated the self-testing kits might not be widely available in the developing world until sometime next year. Groups that work closely with WHO say there is enough evidence that the self-tests help slow transmission based on rich countries' experience and that the guidelines should have been issued long ago.
John Nkengasong, director of the Africa Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, said people would be more empowered to take action if at-home tests were available. Dr. Mamunur Rahman Malik, WHO's representative in Somalia, said a pilot study in that country found that health workers using the tests led to a 40% increase of cases being detected.
I believe they might also lack clean drinking water as well.
Covid was never going to invade and stay in Africa. Africa is the mother of all continents. Anything man made in the lab will not extinguish her flame.