Children neglected in Aids fight

• Over 40,000 children at risk of Aids deaths.

• Almost 90 per cent of HIV-positive children worldwide live in sub-Saharan Africa.

Over 40,000 children are likely to die in the next two years if they do not receive antiretroviral treatment (ART), a report released Tuesday has warned.

The 100-page international human rights report, A Question of Life or Death: Treatment Access for Children Living with HIV in Kenya, documents how the government’s HIV treatment programme has failed to get lifesaving drugs to the majority of children who need them.

Juliane Kippenberg, a senior researcher on Africa in the Children’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, regretted that the Government has focused on getting treatment to adults and has neglected children living with HIV.

“The recent expansion of infant testing is a step in the right direction if carried out properly, but the government needs to do much more to help children overcome treatment access barriers,” Kippenberg said while launching the report.

In the report, the Human Rights Watch says that despite anti-retroviral drugs being free in Kenya, two-thirds of the children who urgently need them are not accessing the drugs.

The report has warned that if untreated, half of all children born with HIV will die before their second birthday, as many local health facilities do not ensure that children have access to HIV tests and rarely offer antiretroviral treatment for children.

This effectively puts the Government on the spot over its commitment to fight HIV and Aids in children.

An associate professor at the University of Nairobi, Dorothy Ngacha, confirmed that only about 25,000 children access ARVs while over 50,000 who are under HIV and AIDS care programme do not access the treatment.

Prof Ngacha, who is based at the department of paediatrics of the university’s school of medicine, said the resources needed to address the problem are larger than what is available.

“Another barrier is the lack of knowledge of the status of the children. There are no concrete statistics available and what we have are mere estimates,” she conceded when tasked to explain the extent of the scourge in the country.

Even the Kenya National AIDS/STDs Control Programme (NASCOP), the Government’s agency started in 1987 to spearhead interventions on the fight against HIV and Aids, only has estimates of the number of children affected, revealed Prof Ngacha.

In NASCOP’s estimates Kenya has at least 60,000 children who need anti-retroviral treatment.

The number, however, could be considerably higher if one takes into account recent government guidelines that require all HIV-positive infants to get treatment.

Available data also indicate that almost 90 per cent of HIV-positive children worldwide live in sub-Saharan Africa. But overall, more than half of the global numbers of people who need of treatment live in Eastern and Southern Africa. The region is said to have the highest number of child deaths due to HIV globally.

The report decries the lack of deliberate effort from the local health facilities to ensure that children have access to HIV tests and get antiretroviral drugs.