HIV Threatens Child Survival

Gaborone - Paediatric HIV care is still a major challenge in southern Africa and only a small number of affected children have access to treatment, a senior health official says.

Officially closing the first regional training workshop on paediatric HIV care at Baylor's Children's Clinical Centre of Excellence in Gaborone, Barbara Mudanga, chief health officer at the Ministry of Health, department of HIV/AIDS prevention and care, said that child survival in the region has been seriously affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

She noted that in Botswana, 10 percent of the people on treatment are children under the age of 15.
She said paediatric diagnosis is now widely available and mother to child transmission has been reduced to six percent.

Some of the challenges in paediatric care are lack of special skills and knowledge required to meet the needs of children. Mudanga said the region has a limited number of paediatricians and other personnel skilled in paediatric care.

She added that there is a slow development of paediatric protocols and that the treatment regimen for children is not well developed.

"Children are continuously in transition of development stages, that is transition from childhood to adolescent which makes treatment more complex," she said.

A participant from Zimbabwe, Professor Rose Kambarami said that the regional training programme was extremely comprehensive and useful. Participants were drawn from seven countries: South Africa, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Botswana.

The five day training of trainers for the clinicians and programme managers addressed issues on clinical management and guidance on setting up comprehensive paediatric HIV care and treatment centres.
UNICEF country representative, Barbara Reynolds, said that in the future they will have turned the epidemic around and Africa would be different.