Nairobi, April 23 -- Nearly 400,000 people living with HIV in Kenya did not receive a viral load test in the final quarter of 2025, new data shows, a gap that could allow undetected treatment failures to silently accumulate across the country's antiretroviral programme.

Viral load testing measures the amount of HIV in a patient's blood. A suppressed result, generally below 1,000 copies per millilitre, indicates that treatment is working and the risk of transmission is low.

An analysis of data from a report by the United States President's Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) shows that of the 1.3 million people currently receiving antiretroviral therapy in Kenya, 928,229 (70.1 percent) had a documented viral load test during this per...