[pronut-hiv] Mozambique: New Dream Centre for HIV-Positive Children

["ProNut-HIV" <pronut-hiv@healthnet.org>]

Mozambique: New Dream Centre for HIV-Positive Children
Agencia de Informacao de Mocambique (Maputo)

July 16, 2006
Maputo

The Italian NGO, the Sant'Egidio Community, on Saturday inaugurated a
centre in Maputo for children infected with HIV, the virus that causes
AIDS, as part of its programme known as DREAM (Drug Resource Enhancement
against AIDS and Malnutrition).

The founder of the Community, Andrea Riccardi, who chaired the ceremony
alongside Mozambique's First Lady, Maria da Luz Guebuza, said the centre
would use advanced technology to monitor progress of the infection among
its victims.

It contains a substantial laboratory, including equipment to measure
the viral load, and the CD4 count (CD4 cells are the part of the human
immune system attacked by the HIV virus - doctors recommend that when a
patient's CD4 count has fallen to 200 per microlitre of blood, he should
be put on anti-retroviral therapy).

"The centre wants to empower activities for the treatment of children,
and wants to guarantee to HIV-positive mothers the possibility of not
transmitting the disease to their children", said Riccardi. "We want
both mother and child to survive and enjoy a good quality of life".

The centre is expected to open to the public within about four months.

Riccardi also inaugurated a nutritional centre, named "Rainbow
Village", in the city of Matola. It is attended by 709 children, aged
from 3 to 13, who are infected with HIV, or whose parents have died of
AIDS.

At this centre the children's state of health is regularly checked, and
they are taught basic notions of personal hygiene.

"We give food and medical care to the children", said the centre's
director, Lidia Lisboa, "because sometimes the children appear here ill,
and their parents don't take them to hospital saying they have no money.
We can't leave the children like that.

So when the doctors visit the centre, they look at the children and
give them medicine".

According to data from the Sant'Egidio community, 8,000 patients are
now receiving anti-retroviral drugs through the DREAM programme (which
is about a third of all those receiving this therapy in Mozambique), and
2,620 HIV-positive pregnant women have gone through the programme of
preventing mother-to- child transmission of the virus. Speaking at the
ceremony, Maria de Luz Guebuza said work is need to expand treatment to
cover all HIV-positive children.

She stressed that the introduction of anti-retroviral therapy was a
major step for Mozambicans to recover self-esteem and hope, faced with
the suffering, stigmatisation and premature death sentence that used to
be the fate of those infected with HIV.

For Guebuza, prevention could not be regarded as the sole response when
so many children are already living with HIV.

Prevention campaigns had to go hand in hand with treating those who are
already sick.

The latest statistics suggest that at least 1.4 million Mozambicans are
HIV-positive, and in perhaps 300,000 of these the disease has reached
the stage at which anti-retroviral treatment is needed. Of this group,
an estimated 52,000 are children under the age of 15.

"In our country only a few thousand patients are receiving specific
treatment for HIV/AIDS", said the First Lady. "We must work so that more
babies of infected mothers can be born healthy.

We must work so that they do not become orphans, and so that those
already infected are helped to live well".