Did USA circulate faulty HIV test kits to African countries?

Medecins sans Frontieres (MSF) has recently discovered after a long study that the USA-government provided dominant HIV test kits used in some African countries failed to meet crucial quality tests leading to patient misdiagnosis.

MSF has forced the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to issue a conceding statement on faulty HIV results. The study reveals that the widely popular HIV kits failed to provide the right results despite being certified by the World Health Organization (WHO).

"Most kits performed more poorly than in WHO evaluations, with only one test (STAT-PAK) meeting the recommended thresholds," lead author Cara S Kosack of MSF told the Standard of newspaper of Kenya that broke the story.

The matter popped up after two agencies acknowledged that they have been providing faulty HIV testing kits which have possibly given many people wrong blood testing results in Africa. According to Kosack, the study that examined HIV kits used in Guinea, Uganda, Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo calls for "the urgent need for a comprehensive, systematic evaluation of these tests".

"Given the potential for severe psychological and social impacts of HIV misdiagnosis, it is imperative that HIV diagnosis is highly sensitive and specific. In addition to the psychological trauma a misdiagnosis can induce in the individual patient, who may inappropriately have been initiated on treatment that is both costly and potentially harmful, there is also the considerable programmatic impact of false positives, which siphon off scarce resources and may undermine client‐patient confidence in the testing," the report noted.