Community care gives hope to infants vulnerable to HIV infection

According to UNAids, last year, some 240,000 children worldwide acquired HIV. That is one new infection every two minutes. In many developing countries, HIV is still one of the major causes of death among children under five. The vast majority of these children contract the virus from their mother during pregnancy, delivery or breastfeeding.

Without treatment, about a third of children living with HIV die by their first birthday and half by their second. Their deaths could be prevented.

Yet, last year, only 42 per cent of infants born to mothers living with HIV in low- and middle-income countries received proper testing. Though the number of new child HIV infections globally has dropped from 580,000 in 2001 to 240,000 last year, efforts must be redoubled to reach the global plan's target of a 90 per cent reduction by 2015. Prevention of mother-to-child transmission is one of the increasingly low-cost approaches that could reduce the risk of transmission.

The approach combines prevention and treatment for both mother and child, with improving reproductive health, antenatal, delivery and post-natal, and infant and child health in a continuum of care.

We focus on community-based prevention of mother-to-child transmission that aims to achieve zero new HIV infections among children within our development programmes and guarantee all pregnant women living with HIV in our project areas access to services in a stigma-free environment. Such community-based schemes include various models to empower a community to ensure the well-being of mothers and their children.

Because HIV affects the whole family, it is useful to offer primary health-care counselling to everyone in the household. Community health workers or volunteers are trained to provide counselling for households with specific needs at specific times, which has proven more effective than random counselling.