CNS STORY: US-Caritas meeting on pediatric AIDS calls for justice in health care

AIDS-CHILDREN Oct-14-2009 (890 words) xxxi

US-Caritas meeting on pediatric AIDS calls for justice in health care

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

ROME (CNS) -- A conference on creating partnerships between government and faith-based organizations to fight HIV and AIDS, particularly among children, turned into something of a rally for a more just global distribution of wealth, health and technology.

Sponsored by the U.S. Embassy to the Holy See and Caritas Internationalis, the Oct. 14-16 conference brought together dozens of Catholic religious and lay organizations providing care to people with AIDS, along with representatives from governments, the United Nations and some of the world's largest pharmaceutical houses.

The fact that "800 children in Africa die every day from AIDS-related illnesses" is "a terrible tragedy, but it is also a scandal," said Lesley-Anne Knight, secretary-general of Caritas Internationalis, the Vatican-based umbrella organization for Catholic charities.

It is a scandal "because we can do something about it," Knight said. Reliable tests exist for knowing whether a pregnant woman is HIV-positive, therapies exist for drastically reducing her chances of transmitting the virus to her baby and tests exist for determining if an infant has the virus and needs treatment, she said.

But in the poorer countries of the world, too many mothers go untested and too few children receive special pediatric AIDS drugs if they get any treatment at all, she said.

Miguel H. Diaz, the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican, opened the conference by invoking the example of the newly canonized St. Damien of Molokai, who not only provided spiritual care for people with leprosy, or Hansen's disease, but also provided medical care and built homes for them.

The ambassador said the conference could help participants "further Father Damien's work of compassion and assistance to vulnerable people."

A partnership between the U.S. government and Catholic organizations is essential, he said, since "the United States is the largest donor of global aid (and) the church is the world's largest aid-delivery organization."

Dr. Giuseppe Profiti, president of the Vatican-related Bambino Gesu Children's Hospital in Rome, told the conference that HIV and AIDS is "a global pediatric catastrophe," with 2 million children living with the virus, 370,000 children newly infected each year, and 270,000 dying each year of AIDS or AIDS-related illnesses -- almost all of them in the world's poorer countries.

While good works are important, Profiti said Catholics have to ask themselves, "Why is that which is easy to access in rich countries impossible to access in poor countries?"

"Solidarity is not sufficient if it does not lead us to change our system of development aid," which seems to be providing enough aid to assuage Western consciences without giving developing countries a real possibility of achieving health and a decent living standard, he said.

Michel Sidibe, executive director of UNAIDS, told conference participants that "nothing could be more noble" than saving mothers and their babies.

While coordinating the anti-AIDS programs of the various United Nations agencies and building partnerships with local prevention and treatment programs are a key part of Sidibe's job, he also campaigns for universal access to HIV testing and AIDS treatment.

"Universal access is about social justice. It's about dealing with the underlying causes of inequalities," Sidibe told the conference. "Alongside practical acts of compassion and service, a passion for justice for the poor is something close to your hearts."

When only 28 percent of pregnant women around the world are tested for HIV, he said, "how can we protect them, how can we prevent transmission to their babies, if we cannot reach them with an inexpensive test?"

Where HIV testing is used and mothers are treated before delivery, he said, the number of babies born HIV-positive is extremely low, so with an expansion of testing and treatment "in a few years we can consign to history the heartbreak of babies born infected."

"Ending the era of children born with HIV is an exciting possibility," Sibide said, while "failure would be an injustice of our own doing."

Representatives from the pharmaceutical houses GlaxoSmithKline, Abbott Laboratories and Eli Lilly and Company emphasized their researchers' progress in improving AIDS tests and drugs and their programs for providing the material, free or at no profit, to the world's poorer countries.

But members of the audience who work with people with AIDS demanded more, and they particularly urged the drug companies to vastly expand access to liquid antiretroviral drugs for children. In too many cases, speakers said, if children with AIDS receive any treatment, it consists of crushed up adult pills, which frequently results in the underdosing that leads to resistance or the overdosing that leads to toxicity.

Dr. Deborah Birx, director of the U.S. Global AIDS Program at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, affirmed President Barack Obama's commitment to funding anti-AIDS projects and offered examples of where and how U.S.-funded programs are succeeding in curbing the mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

While many of the conference participants gratefully acknowledged support received from the U.S. program, they also shared concrete problems they say the program does not address.

For example, a member of the Medical Missionaries of Mary said their program gets AIDS test kits from the program for free, but sometimes cannot afford to buy fuel for the truck to get the blood samples to the laboratory. And, she said, the program provides antiretroviral drugs for people with AIDS, but has no provision for funding the food patients need to survive.

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