The latest UN report on children and HIV/AIDS says that a lot of progress has been made on combating mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus and in the treatment needs of children

According to a report released by UNAIDS, WHO and Unicef, on April 4, 2008, over 2.1 million children below 15 years of age are living with HIV globally, and 15 million children have lost one or both parents to the virus.

The report ‘Children and AIDS: Second stock taking report’ says efforts to reduce the rate of mother-to-child transmission have seen the most significant gains. In 2005, only 11% of women living with HIV were getting drugs to prevent transmission. Now, 31% are receiving treatment.

Advances in paediatric care have been equally dramatic. In 2005, only 70,000 children were getting antiretroviral drugs (ARVs), but in 2006 that number rose to 127,000 -- a 70% increase.

In 2005, Unicef issued a Call to Action to ensure that children were at the heart of programmes to combat HIV/AIDS. Its goals were preventing HIV transmission from mothers to children, providing paediatric treatment, preventing infection among adolescents and young people, and protecting and supporting children affected by AIDS.

Other findings of the report:

• Around 4.2 lakh children were newly infected in 2007.
• An estimated 2.9 lakh children under 15 years died from AIDS the same year.
• The age-group 15-24 accounted for 40% of new HIV infections in 2007.
• The number of HIV-positive pregnant women receiving antiretroviral therapy (ART) to reduce the risk of transmitting the virus to their infants increased by 60% from 2005 to 2006; still, only 23% of HIV-positive pregnant women are receiving ARTs.

Early treatment within the first few months of life can dramatically improve the survival rate of children with HIV, says the report. Twenty-one countries are on track to achieving the target of 10% ARV coverage for prevention of mother-to-child transmission by 2010. India is not among them.

The website of the National AIDS Control Organisation, India’s premier government AIDS agency, has no data on the number of HIV-positive infants/children in India. It says that ‘an estimated cohort of 56,700 infected babies will be born annually’.

The Prevention of Parent-to-Child Transmission (PPTCT) programme, which entails counselling and testing of pregnant women at integrated testing and counselling centres covers just 10% of pregnancies, according to the website. Pregnant women who are found to be HIV-positive are given a single dose of Nevirapine at the time of labour; their newborn babies also get a single dose of Nevirapine immediately after birth so as to prevent transmission of HIV from mother to child.

The paediatric formulation of ART doses was only available in India in 2006, when the treatment protocol for paediatric HIV cases was released under the National Paediatric HIV/AIDS Initiative.

Source: www.unicef.org, April 2008
              www.nacoonline.org, April 2008