Child specific drugs needed: Caritas

Published: December 03, 2008





Caritas International has issued a call to pharmaceutical companies to develop affordable drugs specifically for children with HIV/AIDS, many of whom die before their second birthday.



Lesley-Anne Knight, the secretary general of the Rome based organisation, said in a statement released in Vienna that one third of adult HIV positive adults, but only 15 percent of infected children worldwide, had access to anti-retroviral drugs, which can delay the onset of AIDS, Monsters and Critics reports.



"We therefore ask pharmaceutical companies to develop child friendly medication and to sell them at affordable prices. We call on governments to support this research," Knight said.



Caritas and other Catholic organisations provide around a quarter of medical AIDS relief in Africa.



Children under the age of 15 accounted for 2.1 million of the 33.2 million people living with HIV in 2007, according to a joint report by the World Health Organisation and several other UN agencies published in April.





Of these children, 90 percent lived in sub-Saharan Africa.

In 2007, some 420,000 children were infected with the virus globally and 290,000 died of AIDS, according to the report.

SOURCE

Catholic charity Caritas calls for children-specific HIV drugs (Monsters and Critics, 2/12/08)