Children lack access to HIV testing and treatment

Just five percent of South Africa's HIV-positive children - around 3,000 of the 60,000 in need of antiretroviral (ARV) drugs - are currently receiving them; the rest are still waiting to access the free treatment. Moreover, in the past few years, only about half of all HIV-exposed infants have been tested, according to Professor Gayle Sherman of the Department of Molecular Medicine and Haematology at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. "Infant diagnosis is far too limited," she said at the 2nd South African AIDS Conference in Durban, adding that in low-resource settings about 40 percent of HIV-infected infants died by the time they reached the age of one year. Sherman said she was putting her hope of improved infant HIV-testing in the dried blood spot test, a method that was cheaper and faster, and required less skill than the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) tests often used for children. Dried blood spot tests could be administered by nurses, for example, yet the method was as sensitive and specific as PCR testing.