The New England Journal of Medicine discusses children with HIV are due to their mothers passing to them during pregnancy. Most happen in low-income countries. The children themselves cannot do anything about it and are "voiceless." So children, who got HIV when they were born, mostly depend on the mother’s lifestyle. 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 in a long term period. Because this complicated situation will not be solved unless start a program to educate 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. Many low income families have financial problem. Overall new drugs would help out the HIV infected children, but they are virtually useless if there is no access to healthcare services, 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.
In the US and Europe, HIV infections from mother to child are less than 1% due to using intervention methods like antiretroviral drugs, proper delivery of the baby when born, and using baby formula or other replacements instead of breast feeding. The cost of developing and research a new drug with unforeseen side effects seem highly unnecessary seeing that the methods in place already have very high success rates. Unfortunately, in developing countries, these methods are not all completely feasible. However, if such methods already face difficulties in being in place, a new drug will even less likely be able to get used.
ReplyDeleteTreating the children infected with HIV in developing regions of the world is a great obstacle in itself. Ways to prevent this challenge will lighten the burden from spreading the infectious disease from mother to child. It is vital to not only educate mothers on safe sex, but also their male partners. Additionally, providing the necessary prenatal care for both mother and child will help alleviate the new cases of HIV found among newborn children. All these preventative actions have the potential to reduce the number of new HIV cases worldwide.
ReplyDeleteThe push for HIV medication to be available to children who received HIV from their parents is a nice goal, but in the long term is not very effective. The focus needs to be more on ways to stop the passing on of HIV from mother to child. Then these medications that originally were needed for children who have HIV due to their mother, will no longer be needed and the medication and money can go to other more suitable places for global health needs. Such as education, condoms, primary health care, maternal health care etc.
ReplyDeleteWhile you do make some good points, most of the time, it's not the woman's choice whether they want to have sex or not. Or even if a condom will be used or not. Most developing countries, the man has the control, and more times than not, they will not use condoms, making HIV infections run rampant. Most of the time, giving the children anti-retrovirals is the only response that can be done. Really, there needs to be reform in culture (which is unlikely to happen) so that people realize that women are people too and deserve to be treated equally and with care. THAT would reduce HIV infections significantly
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