Young HIV victims must not be forgotten
By Alfred Romann (China Daily)
Updated: 2005-09-22 06:25

Social stigma

Families hide children once they learn they are infected; they take them out of school, move them out of the reach of doctors and keep the knowledge buried.

This stigma is coupled with widespread fear of the often-vicious side effects of anti-retroviral drugs - side effects that can be particularly serious when children use drugs meant for adults.

In May, the United States-based Clinton Foundation launched a programme to provide free paediatric drugs in half a dozen countries around the world. China was the first. The foundation budgeted doses covering 2,000 children for a year. To date only about 200 cases have been identified, according to the foundation's Christina Ho.

Shanghai is an example of the hurdles faced in treating infected children.

"In Shanghai there are only a few cases, but we never found the children, so they never got the treatment," said Pan Xiaozhang, an AIDS specialist at Shanghai's Huashan Hospital. "I think the children problem is very serious."

This deadly game of hide-and-seek only exacerbates the difficulties of treating children living with HIV/AIDS.

Anti-retroviral drug cocktails, widely available to adults, are much more difficult to administer to children. Children need different and milder formulations. Dosages change depending on their age and size.

Just diagnosing them can pose complications. In recent studies, the non-governmental international health organization Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF, also known as Doctors Without Borders) does not include children younger than 18 months.

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