Drug giant to establish paediatric AIDS corps

A new programme by drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb (BMS) and the Baylor College of Medicine in the US will provide medical care to African children living with HIV/AIDS. The collaboration, announced on Monday, is to create a paediatric AIDS corps that will send 250 doctors to the continent, to the benefit of an estimated 80,000 children over the next five years. "This programme brings paediatricians and family practitioners to Africa to treat children and train local health professionals; builds more children's clinical centres, from which the physicians will operate; and further reduces the cost of our HIV medicines," BMS chief executive officer Peter R. Dolan said in a statement. The US $40 million initiative, which is currently recruiting, aims to hire at least fifty physicians in the first year of the programme.