A total of 577 children are said to be accessing paediatric anti-retroviral drugs in Luapula province at present.
Zambia Prevention, Counselling and Testing (ZPCT) Paediatric Anti-Retroviral Therapy (ART) expert Dr Mwanza Wa Mwanza disclosed this today.
Dr Mwanza said that despite a number of factors inhibiting paediatric Aids treatment initiatives in the country, Luapula province has managed to put 577 on treatment.
He ,however, said although the 577 figure may seem like an impressive population of children accessing paediatric ART, the province still has a long way to go to meet the WHO target.
He said according to the WHO, an indicator of good paediatric ART coverage should be 10 percent of the adult population that is on treatment at present.
He said 577 children on paediatric ART only represent 6.8 percent of the 8,027 adults who currently taking ARVs in Luapula.
He was speaking when he presented a paper on Paediatric ART and its challenges in Luapula province during a one-day provincial level policy dialogue meeting at Teja lodge in Mansa.
He cited among others, the shortage of qualified human staff to administer paediatric ART and inconsistent paediatric counselling and testing as some of the challenges facing Aids treatment among children.
He said delay in getting results for tested children was the bigger challenge as the whole country relies on only one Dry Blood Sample (DBS) machine at Arthur Davison Children’s Hospital in Ndola. The DBS is a medical process used for testing HIV in children.
“The current anti-body tests used in detecting HIV in adults are not reliable at the moment, so we use the DBS method. But the country has only one machine at Arthur Davison Hospital where we all send the blood samples and test results usually take three months to come back,” he said.
He said another management gap was lack of a system to track all cases of positive children with the involvement of the community as stigma was making parents shun having their children tested.
Dr. Mwanza called for consolidated mobilisation of both human resource, backed with capacity building in paediatric Aids treatment, and providing required equipment for testing HIV in children.
ZANIS
Poor little victims of the system.
God knows why innocent ones are victimised he will protect
Am surprised the usual HIV conspiracy theorists haven’t already rushed in here to spout their ignorance . It’s good to see that the dry spot testing has been adopted because the antibody test has been has had a lot of people confused that they have been cured when it was just a false positive
The World Health Organisation in published articles, called for scientists to work with these deadly agents and attempt to make a hybrid virus that would be deadly to humans. In the bulletin of the World Health Organisation WHO), Volume 47, p.259, 1972, they said, “An attempt should be made to see if viruses can in fact exert selective effects on immune function. The possibility should be looked into that the immune response to the vims itself may be impaired if the infecting virus damages, more or less selectively, the cell responding to the virus.”
That’s AIDS. What the WHO is saying in plain English is “Let’s cook up a virus that selectively destroys the T-cell system of man, an acquired immune deficiency.” Why would anyone want to do this?
Poor INNOCENT little ones 557 too bad
Lekeni Sata ateke!
Things will be done differently and with better results!
http(colonfowardslashforwardslash)aids(dash)science(dot)blogspot(dotcom) …
go and READ for yourself!!!