Pediatric Program
Without treatment, one in two children living with HIV will not live to see the age of two, and 80% will die before age five. More than two 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 a 1,000 needless deaths daily.
Launched in April 2005, the Pediatric Program of the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiativebegan working with partner governments in nearly a dozen countries to rapidly increase access to pediatric treatment. One year later, we had reached 10,000 children – double the number of children on treatment globally when we started (excluding successful existing programs in Brazil and Thailand). Most importantly, we showed that expanding pediatric HIV/AIDS treatment was possible in all settings and economically viable. In 2006, we launched an ambitious new phase of the program in partnership with UNITAID – an international funding source for HIV/AIDS organizations. By 2007, we were helping governments and partners deliver life-saving drugs and tests to children in over 30 countries.
Now, CHAI is helping to support the treatment of approximately 195,000 children in 34 countries globally.
How CHAI Helps
CHAI focuses on the following key areas to provide high- quality care and treatment to HIV-positive children.
Access to Affordable Treatment
CHAI, with the support of UNITAID and its government partners, has reduced the price by 90% for “fixed-dose combination” pediatric antiretroviral treatment (ART), with the cost of treatment falling from $567 to $60 per child per year.
Access to Health Care Workers
CHAI supports training programs, develops specialized tools to help clinicians’ dose children’s medicines accurately, deploys clinical mentors to provide hands-on training, and recruits and places local health care workers in clinics to provide quality health care to children. Now thousands of health care workers are delivering high-quality health care to children living with HIV.
Access to Child-Friendly Treatment
Until recently, most countries have been using syrups and solutions to treat children with HIV/AIDS. These are unpleasant for children to take, difficult for caregivers and health workers to administer, and are packaged in a dozen bottles which caretakers have to travel long distances to refill every month. Thanks to a pharmaceutical breakthrough, today’s pediatric treatment comes in the form of a dispersible three-in -one tablet, a month’s supply of which fits in the palm of one’s hand. CHAI facilitated rapid access to this new product, introducing these pills in 26 countries in 2007, at least a year earlier than would have otherwise been possible.
Access to Testing
To enable identification of HIV-positive infants, CHAI has played an active role in building early infant diagnosis systems. In addition to strengthening countries’ capacity to run these tests, training health care workers and establishing sample transport networks, CHAI negotiated lower prices for these and bundle together the necessary materials and kits to make buying the test easier. These efforts increased the number of sites doing early infant diagnosis sampling from less than 200 to 1,400 in 2007.
PROFILE
Ernest was diagnosed with HIV in December 2004, at age 11, at the Family Support Unit at the University Teaching Hospital in Lusaka, Zambia. After receiving news that her son was HIV-positive ...
