Monday 6 August 2007

Hope beyond HIV

We take Praise to the BIPAI Children’s Clinical Centre of Excellence.

Praise was born in April but looks like he’s 1 month old. He’s a tiny baby. He is treated for TB (Tuberculosis) but his health doesn’t improve and has even worsened throughout the last few days. Praise’s mum was HIV positive… So Mwawe wants his blood to be tested. If the blood test comes back positive it means that Praise has HIV. HIV is a retrovirus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), a condition in which the virus infects and destroys immune cells, breaks down the body’s defenses and can lead to life-threatening opportunistic infections.

Thanks to advances in the care and treatment of HIV/AIDS children no longer face a disease that once was invariably fatal, but rather one that is chronic and treatable. It’s not a matter of “there is no treatment for these children"... The medications and resources are available to save lives–it’s just a matter of getting those resources to the people in places most in need. Like Madalitso Praise will be put on Highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), a combination of antiretroviral drugs that can suppress the ability of the virus to replicate within the body.

Texas Children’s Retrovirology Clinic, in partnership with Baylor College of Medicine, has established the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative (BIPAI), the world’s largest international pediatric AIDS outreach initiative, to offer hope to children and families in developing countries across Africa and around the world.Established in 1996, BIPAI has put more than 5,000 African children on HAART.



Facts: Of the more than 2.3 million HIV-infected children worldwide, 90 percent live south of the Sahara. There, nine children under the age of 5 die every minute. And fewer than one in 10 children who need medications like HAART are actually receiving them. Half of all untreated HIV-positive infants die before the age of 2 for lack of medication that, when properly administered, can produce transformations almost overnight…

We wait almost 2 hours and are eventually send back to the nursery. The computers' system is down! I feel sad. Look at these tiny fingers...

www.childrenhospital.com, www.bayloraids.com.