![]() | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Epidemiology The people of Kenya need your
Demographic data contained in this section was obtained from the following sources: The 2005 World Population Data Sheet of the Population Reference Bureau was used for total population, life expectancy at birth, infant mortality, fertility, birth rate, death rate, % of population 15-49 with HIV/AIDS and the GNI per capita (2002). Malaria-Kenya-WHO Within this fragile health sector malaria continues to burden the over-stretched health services in Kenya. Malaria constitutes over 30% of all clinic attendance's and hospital admissions. Such figures, however, do not reflect the burden to the population at large and recent estimates suggest that approximately 26,000 children under the age of five die each year from the direct consequences of malaria (Snow et al., 1998). Tuberculosis has made an opportunistic comeback in conjunction with the AIDS epidemic. From a low of 11,000 cases in 1988, tuberculosis cases reached 40,000 in 1997, and 73,000 cases in 2001. Malaria is also a serious public health concern, with over 4.3 million cases reported in 1995. Kenya is a remarkably young nation, with 70 percent of the population under age 20. It is the youngest adults who are hardest hit by the current AIDS crisis, with 70 percent of HIV positive persons between the ages of 18 and 25. HIV has hit young women much harder than young men, with HIV infection rates among 15 to 19 year old women exceeding 20 percent in some areas of the country, as opposed to 4 percent for men in the same age category. The Medicins Sans Frontieres program in the Lake Victoria region estimates that 35 percent of young women in the area have contracted HIV, and 60 percent of those women have latent, if not active, TB. It is estimated that about 51 percent of Kenya's adult TB cases are also HIV+. Despite this, 23 percent of Kenya's 32 million people do not have access to basic health care facilities. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||