Leading charity Marie Stopes has recalled over a million condoms distributed in Uganda due to concerns about their safe use.
Marie Stopes decided to recall the Indian-manufactured Life Guard brand condoms after tests found that some of them contained holes or risked bursting. Uganda's National Drug Authority (NDA) conducted the quality tests.
Marie Stopes, a charity that provides contraception and family planning services in more than 35 countries, supplies around 1.5 million to two million condoms to Uganda monthly. The charity said: "We can confirm this is the first time that one of our country programs has needed to issue this kind of recall."
The decision to conduct a recall was made by Marie Stopes after the NDA wrote on October 30 that two batches of Life Guard condoms failed to comply with "quality tests". According to the charity, it is cooperating with the NDA to "urgently investigate what happened with these batches and ensure our products continue to meet the high standard of quality".
Marie Stopes claimed: "We can confirm that the two batches we are recalling contained around 335,000 condom packs - just over 1 million individual condoms. We have recovered more than half of those."
According to the United Nations, almost 6% of adults in Uganda are living with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) while studies have shown that only 11% of people in the country have planned pregnancies.
A 2018 report by the UN showed that 1.4 million people in Uganda were living with HIV and the HIV incidence is 1.4 per 1,000 uninfected. Of those living with HIV, 84% knew their status, 72% receives treatment, and 64% are virally suppressed.
The UN found that women are disproportionally affected by HIV in Uganda, with 59.23% of those living with HIV were women. New HIV infections among young women aged 15–24 years were more than double those among young men, at 14,000 new infections compred to 5,000 respectively.
