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Pediatric Program

Without treatment, one in two children living with HIV will not live to see the age of 2, and 80 percent will die before age 5. Approximately 2.1 million children are estimated to be infected, and more than a third need immediate treatment. Prior to 2005, due to the complicated and costly nature of pediatric treatment, these children had no place to turn, leading to almost 1,400 needless deaths daily. The continued plight of children was in sharp contrast to the progress being made in many countries in identifying and treating HIV-positive adults.

How CHAI Helps

Recognizing that children were being left behind in global efforts to expand care and treatment, President Clinton and CHAI established a Pediatric Program in 2005 to reach this vulnerable population. The program focuses on the following key areas to facilitate access to high-quality care and treatment for HIV-positive children.

• Increasing access to affordable pediatric treatment: CHAI has worked to reduce the cost of treatment, resulting in a 60 percent reduction in the price of pediatric ARVs and catalyzing the development of an easily-dispensable child-friendly tablet for the first time.
• Helping to make widespread testing of children possible: CHAI has significantly increased access to DNA PCR testing for the diagnosis of infants under the age of 18 months, by improving countries’ ability to run tests at central labs, training healthcare workers in an easy sample collection method, and establishing transport networks for samples and results.
• Training healthcare workers in pediatric care: CHAI has supported training programs, deployed clinical mentors to provide hands-on training, and recruited and placed local health workers to treat children. In all, we have supported the training of 2,700 healthcare workers.
• Improving national capacity to manage pediatric programs: CHAI has worked with national and local governments to increase the number of sites equipped to treat children, and to create designated capacity for managing pediatric programs.

Through these efforts and in partnership with UNITAID, CHAI is now helping to support the treatment of more than 220,000 children in 34 countries globally.