No, 12,000 students out of 16,000 in Kirinyaga Central Sub-county have not contracted STIs.

Rating Justification

The iVerify Network of Fact-Checking Desks has fact-checked this content and established that it is Misleading.

To arrive to this conclusion, the iVerify Network of Fact-Checking Desks has conducted the following process. On November 29, 2022, we contacted the office of the County Executive Committee (CEC) for Medical Services in charge of Medical Services, Public Health, and Sanitation in Kirinyaga, George Karoki, and informed us that the information is misleading and clarified that the department of Health recorded and treated 4,409 cases of STIs in the entire county and 1,345 cases in Kirinyaga Central Sub-county this year.

We also discovered a statement by Dr Karoki, posted on the official Facebook page of the County Government of Kirinyaga on November 28, stating that the “claims cannot be substantiated” and that the department has not conducted mass STI testing on secondary school students. Kirinyaga County Commissioner Moses Ivuto had also questioned the statistics provided by the county senior education officer Kennedy Machora, according to Karoki, who asked officials to ‘learn’ to provide accurate figures.