This article discusses the children with HIV due to their mothers passing in on during pregnancy in low-income countries. The children themselves can not do anything about it and are "voiceless". However, the authors mention that there needs to be a batch of first-line drugs available for these children with HIV, and that will solve most of the problem. In all reality, the medication would save some lives of children yes, but it would not solve the problem. This complicated situation will not be solved unless you start with educating women. This could involve changing entire cultures depending on which country is being regarded. Women need to be educated, and told how they can prevent passing HIV to their infants. Also, it is just as important to inform the men as well because they need to understand how important this really is too.
Another issue is access to these drugs and prenatal care for these mothers and infants. The family, no matter how educated, needs access to those before they can even take action to prevention. This all takes MONEY, and that just is not possible for these places that need it the most. All in all, yes new drugs would help out the HIV infected children, but they are virtually useless if there is no access to healthcare facilities, money, or education of the HIV situation. This does not mean, that new drugs should not be created and the effort should just stop, but before we put all of our efforts into these drugs, the real issues need to be addressed.
global health
Pediatric HIV — A Neglected Disease?
Marc Lallemant, M.D., Shing Chang, Ph.D., Rachel Cohen, M.P.P., and Bernard Pecoul, M.D., M.P.H.
(Just in case the link does not work, because I had to subscribe to the New England Journal of Medicine)
Danielle Frye
Education and money do seem to be the largest hurdles to overcome with this world-wide HIV situation. Prenatal care and first-line drugs are imperative to prevent or curb the spread of HIV to newborns and children, which can be expensive. However, if populations are not educated about the spread of HIV, such care will be a useless expense. Your analysis shows just how intertwined all of these issues are and how much needs to be addressed before any real headway can progress.
ReplyDeleteFirst-line drugs for children is the short term solution but for a long term solution the need of education is necessary. You can keep on giving drugs to people who are infected but prevention is the best cure and is the best drug possible to the cure of HIV. But at the same time you need to combine the long term education solution with the provision of drugs to help in the short term. With more emphasis on education which providing drugs can help solve children being born with HIV.
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