Malteser International handed over to the Kenyan government a laboratory for the health centre in Nairobi’s Dandora shantytown, one of the most densely populated in the capital. In the Dandora area over 370 thousand people live in abject poverty. The health centre carried out some 210,000 check-ups in 2009. In this way the Order of Malta’s international relief corps wanted to highlight the fact that tuberculosis is still responsible for over a million deaths worldwide.

The laboratory that has just been consigned to the government was built with the support of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development and is one of the many initiatives promoted by Malteser International. It is crucial to make the testing facilities as accessible as possible to the population, so that anti-TB and AIDS therapies can be initiated promptly. Among other things, this enables local staff to be trained and employed, another key element for the Malteser International’s successful work in Nairobi, together with educating the population in health and hygiene