PRESS CONFERENCE ON LAUNCH OF REPORT BY GLOBAL MOVEMENT FOR CHILDREN

With 2.3 million children under the age of 15 living with HIV worldwide, most of them with no access to any form of treatment or care, “we are failing the children”, Dean Hirsch, President of the World Vision International and Chair of the Global Movement for Children, told correspondents at a Headquarters press conference this afternoon as he launched an urgent appeal for Governments, donors and pharmaceutical companies to place children with HIV and AIDS on the global HIV agenda.

Also participating in the launch of the Global Movement for Children report “Saving Lives – Children’s Right to HIV and AIDS Treatment” were Executive Director of the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) Ann Veneman, and President of Save the Children USA Charles McCormick.

Calling on the international community to recognize children’s right to treatment as a fundamental human right and to specifically include them in national and international HIV/AIDS initiatives, Mr. Hirsch said that much was being done to fight HIV/AIDS, but international efforts had so far ignored the needs of children.  Currently, less than 5 per cent of HIV-positive children had access to the paediatric AIDS treatment they desperately needed.  Lack of treatment guaranteed their death, for without treatment, most children with HIV would die before their fifth birthday.

Participants said, among other things, that children represented 18 per cent of all AIDS deaths, that infant mortality in Africa has increased by over 19 per cent, and that a child died from AIDS-related illnesses every minute.  Some 90 per cent of HIV incidence in infants resulted from mother-to-child transmission.  “The deaths of these children are not inevitable”, Mr. Hirsch insisted.  HIV-positive children could and did respond to anti-retroviral treatment.

Participants at the press conference reminded correspondents that last year, during the World Summit and the G8 Summit, leaders worldwide had committed to coming as close as possible to universal treatment by 2010.  However, for that commitment to be upheld, national and international leaders must recognize the unique treatment needs of children.  Among the actions that needed to be taken, they listed provision of services to prevent mother-to-child transmission to all women; access to cotrimoxazole -- a highly effective antibiotic treatment in preventing opportunistic infections in HIV-infected children; and the availability of anti-retroviral treatment to children, including paediatric formulations for children under the age of three.

Mr. McCormick pointed out that inexpensive affordable treatments had been found in the last 15 years that could preserve the lives of children born to HIV-positive mothers.  HIV solutions needed to be part of the general maternal and child health investment.  The promises that Governments had made in that regard needed to be kept.  African Governments, for instance, had pledged to assign 15 per cent of their budgets to their public health systems, but less than one third of those countries had achieved that goal.  Other world leaders were “not exactly keeping their promises, either”.  As a result, the world suffered hundreds of thousands of unnecessary child deaths each year.

Ms. Veneman said that the world viewed HIV/AIDS as primarily an adult problem, yet as a result of the disease, children were missing parents, teachers, protection, treatment and care.  It was necessary to place children high on the international agenda, and one could not assume that what worked for adults would also work for children.  For example, diagnosing infants required special expertise and expensive equipment that was not widely available in the developing world.  For that reason, world players needed to work together to develop simple and affordable diagnostic for young children.  There were also fewer varieties of anti-retroviral treatment drugs suitable for use in children, and those that were available tended to be more expensive that the adult regiment.  Despite those issues, however, there was reason for optimism that the availability and affordability of paediatric treatments would soon increase.  As the report said, national health-care systems needed to be a priority in national budgets.  Health-care professionals should be trained to meet children’s needs.

Strengthened partnerships between public and private sectors were also important, she continued.  That was the foundation of “Unite for Children, Unite against AIDS” -- a five-year global campaign launched by UNICEF, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and other partners in October last year.  The campaign focused on four main areas:  prevention of mother-to-child transmission, paediatric treatment, educating and preventing infection among adolescents and young people, and supporting infants and children made vulnerable by AIDS.

Asked what was keeping several nations, specifically in the European Union, from keeping their dedicated funding promises, Ms. Veneman said:  “I can’t speak for the EU and I don’t want to speculate as to what they are putting in those programmes and what they are not.”  However, it was important to recognize that, generally, there had been considerable increases in the investment for AIDS treatment.  One of the messages that needed to be conveyed was that in investing in AIDS, one could not forget about the children.  It was necessary to look into issues that were relevant to children, whether it was mother-to-child transmission or treatment of paediatric cases.  In investing in treatment, some of core-related issues also needed to be addressed, including the development of health systems, testing and nutrition.  In that connection, she emphasized the importance of a community-based integrated approach to health care.

Also on financing, Mr. McCormick said that if the Millennium Development Goals, including those on gender equity, education and primary health care, were to be achieved, the number of HIV-positive children would be massively reduced.  The difficulty was that neither host Governments nor donors were keeping their promises.  What tended to happen with the donors when there were not enough resources was that if they saw that one was giving a bit more in one area, they tended to place their money somewhere else.  It would not be surprising to him, given the fact that the United States had pledged really significant amounts to HIV, that the Europeans were saying, “well, we’ll leave that to the Americans to take care of and we’ll put our funding in the basic education or other things”.  Although on the whole, it was not enough in any of those areas.

To a question about stem cell research, Ms. Veneman said that, while she did not know if such research could specifically lead to finding an AIDS cure, any research providing more information about the basics of any disease could help in finding cures over time.  To that, Mr. McCormick added that the issue was very divisive in many developing countries, and Mr. Hirsch said that some 90 per cent of HIV-positive women and their children did not have access to already available help.  For that reason, there was no need to wait for new research.  What was important to make available the breakthroughs that had already happened.

Responding to another query, Ms. Veneman said that, according to some estimates, up to one third of women in some African countries had their first sexual experience as a forced one.  Many of those women were under the age of 18.  The world needed to pay more attention to that issue -- not only from the point of view of abuse, but also from the point of view of the danger of the spread of HIV/AIDS.  Education was a key component in that regard.  It clearly needed to be tailored to the age of the child.

“The more we can get people to understand their status, the more we can educate them, the more we’ll be able to stem the tide of this disease”, she said.  Increasingly, children and young people had access to the information they needed.  For example, during her recent visit to the United Republic of Tanzania, she had asked a group of children in a remote village if they would undergo voluntary AIDS testing, should it become available.  Literally, all the young people had raised their hands, which meant that they were not only learning about HIV/AIDS, but also wanted to know their status.

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For information media • not an official record