Babies, children and adolescents get HIV care from ECHO services

Nearly half the teenagers admitted to two hospitals in Harare in Zimbabwe were infected with HIV and the virus was the most common cause of in-hospital death among them, a new study shows.

Adult opportunistic infections and chronic paediatric HIV/AIDS complications were the most common cause for their admission.

Many of them were likely to have a mother who was HIV-positive or who had died of AIDS but they had survived into older childhood.

Now they need “better recognition” and care, Rashida Ferrand and his co-authors stated.

Wits HIV expert, Professor Glenda Gray, supported this call, stating in the same journal: “There is an urgent need for services that will be able to provide accessible and appropriate HIV testing, counselling, and support, as well as facilitate access to ART and appropriate sexual risk-reduction interventions.

“The adolescents admitted to hospitals in Harare could have benefited from early diagnosis and concomitant initiation of ART, and this absence of treatment should not continue to be the plight of similar adolescents in our region.”

In South Africa as many as half a million children are estimated to have HIV.

Dr Marnie Vujovic, a clinical psychologist for Wits Paediatric HIV Clinics, said that sensitive and age-appropriate disclosure to adolescents born with HIV was critical to their physical, mental and social wellbeing – and to avoid them finding out by accident.

“Disclosure to children is the biggest issue in our caregiver support groups and a problem at all sites,” she said.

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