HIV and KSHV

I yesterday attended a meeting by the HIV Clinicians society called "Towards Universal Access" and it was about HIV/AIDS in Namibia.
I went there with baggage - my interest in finding out whether the ministry of health follows the number of diagnoses of Kaposi Sarcoma patients.

So the meeting had lots of percentages. There was the global perspective and there was a Namibian perspective. The percentages were always observed over expected times 100. Simple enough. The number of people that are observed to receive XYZ over those that we expect to receive XYZ.

The indicators included patients on ART (anti-retroviral therapy), adult and children, access to PMTCT (Prevention to Mother and Child Transmission of HIV).

The presentation about Namibia was given by Dr Martin Odit, who is the UNAIDS technical advisor for HIV/AIDS in Namibia. He is an epidemiologist and a phycisian.
He said the data was collected via ePMS, an electronic database for managing patients who go to the ART/CDC clinics all over the country. The ART/CDC clinic records information for patients who are HIV+ but not do not yet need ART (pre-ART), patients who need ART.

The ePMS system collects information in the registration boook, pre-ART register, HIV patient care booklets, ART registers, lab request forms, amongst other referal forms (Ministry of Health and Social Services, Supportive Supervison and Mentorship Visit Checklist for M&E at programme level). However, it is not sure that all of this information ends up in ePMS.