NAIROBI, KENYA — Widowed and HIV-positive, Beatrice Acheing had no money to have her baby delivered in a hospital. But she admitted herself anyway to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus during childbirth.
To her relief, the boy was born HIV-negative. But their ordeal had just begun. Hours after labor, both mother and baby were shunted into a locked, guarded room with other indigent patients. They were given one meal, sometimes two, a day, but no clothes or diapers for the infants. Nurses visited sporadically, mostly harassing them to pay their bills.
After a week in the makeshift patients' prison, Acheing's infant son began to shiver uncontrollably. One night, with no doctors on duty and the guard too far to hear her cries for help, he died in her arms.
The next morning a nurse took the baby away. But hospital officials detained the grieving mother for six more months, demanding $250 in fees. She escaped one morning when the guard fell asleep.
"I never found out what happened to [the body of] my baby," said Acheing, 31.
Tragically, healthcare horror stories are common in Africa, where developing countries rarely have medical safety nets for the poor. But an increase in cases of cash-starved public hospitals and mortuaries detaining patients and even corpses over unpaid bills is spurring outrage in Kenya.
The parents of one 11-year-old girl with kidney disease issued a public appeal in April to clear a $2,000 hospital bill. The girl recovered in January but has been detained since then by the government-run Kenyatta National Hospital here in Nairobi, the capital.
The same facility was pressured this month to release 44 new mothers after a TV station used a hidden camera to prove that they were being held in a padlocked room.
"They know very well these people can never pay those bills," said Njoroge Baiya, a Kenyan lawmaker who has raised the issue in parliament. "A more humane policy should be developed."
Experts say government inaction makes the practice de facto policy, even though its legality has been questioned.
With such policies, it's little wonder that poor Kenyans who are seriously ill or dying often avoid hospitals, even though they might provide treatment or dispense painkillers and help control public contagion.
