Legal provisions for sick inmates

By Harold Ayodo

The Prisons Act Chapter 90 Laws of Kenya guarantees sick prisoners and remandees the right to medication.

It empowers medical officers in charge of medical facilities in prisons to refer inmates to hospitals.

The officer in charge of a prison may, without the advice of a medical officer, order the transfer of any prisoner or remandee to hospital in case of emergencies.

Inmates who are taken to hospital by the prison authorities are deemed to be under detention from the correctional facilities.

Specialised treatment

The legislation empowers a medical officer to report to the Commissioner of Prisons if an inmate is a leper for transfer for specialised treatment. The Act provides that lepers discharged from the specialised treatment shall remain liable to confinement in prison.

It, however, defines a leper as a person suffering from active leprosy.

In 2007, a Multi-Drug Resistant Tuberculosis (MDRTB) patient was feared to have infected passengers aboard a flight in the United States.

The US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was forced to search for all passengers who were in contact with the patient. The US authorities arrested the patient and confined him in a respiratory isolation ward in hospital.

The CDC tracked the patient’s movements and learnt that he had travelled to Europe via a commercial airline and departed at Atlanta before proceeding to Paris.

WHO guidelines

He returned to the US aboard a commercial flight from Prague, Czech Republic then to Montreal, Canada. He re-entered the US by road from Canada before he was arrested and hospitalised.

CDC, the US Government and Ministries of Health all over the world were concerned with the health risks posed to those who had gotten in contact with the victim. The World Health Organisation and the airline industry followed up on the crew and passengers who boarded the same flights with this passenger.

WHO says the patient was considered potentially infectious at the time of his travel, and therefore met the criteria in the WHO guidelines for initiating an airline contact investigation.

The CDC said the serious consequences of the disease and public concern made passengers aboard the flights to be notified and encouraged to seek TB testing and evaluation.