Professor Adewole: Nigeria’s minister of health

The Minister of Health, Prof. Isaac Adewole, on Wednesday said out of 380,000 children living with HIV, 42,000 have access to anti-retroviral treatment in the country.

Adewole said this during the regional consultation organised by Caritas International, an NGO, with the theme “Early diagnosis and treatment for HIV positive children: Strengthening engagement of Faith-based Organisation”, in Abuja.

Represented by the Director-General, National Agency for the Control of AIDs (NACA), Dr Sani Aliyu, the minister said it was important that organisations and health professionals engage in the care of children with HIV and AIDS.

“The 380,000 HIV infected children may sound like massive numbers and huge burden, the numbers become less alarming when spread and distributed among a population of 200 million and 774 local government areas.

“Our facilities possess the capacity to cover the need of all of the estimated 380,000 HIV positive children in Nigeria, if they were to approach the health services all at once, but our challenge is that they are not coming forward,” he said.

Adewole said with collaboration with partners, tremendous amount of work was properly reflected by the outcomes especially in the case of children.

“More than 80 per cent of our comprehensive HIV treatment centres are offering paediatric ART services.

“We have revised our approach to training of health workers to improve efficiency and maximise the number of health workers trained per naira spent.”

Adewole said there was need to implement the entirely indigenous clinical mentoring meeting that had exposed approximately 64 per cent of secondary level health facilities to focused high quality paediatric HIV training.

However, he called for the need to explore new approaches, saying the population density and spread present very significant challenges for identification of HIV positive children.

The minister said efforts have been made to provide access to quality care for the population if children living with HIV/AIDS.

“We are implementing the entirely indigenous clinical mentoring meetings that have exposed approximately 64 per cent of our secondary level health facilities to focused high quality paedriatic HIV training,” he said.

Earlier, the National Director, Caritas Nigeria, Rev. Fr. Everistus Bassey, said Nigeria still have a long way to go in terms of care for children born with HIV as only about 15 per cent of children with HIV have access to anti-retroviral care.

Bassey noted that there was poor level of conducting virological tests on infants within two months of their birth.

“I know that since our government adopted the strategy of scaling up prevention of mother to child, this has brought down the number of infants born with HIV.

“Government has gone ahead to establish 23 early infant diagnostic centres yet when we look at the progress that has taken place in other countries, we see that Nigeria has only about a 19 per cent reduction in new infections when others go as high as 40 or 50 per cent,” he said.

He urged for a government and faith based community collaboration to build a better health system in the country.

The Peadiatric Focal Point official of World Health Organisation (WHO), Dr Martina Penazzato, said five million children have died of HIV since the beginning of the epidemic due to the lack of early prevention.

An HIV patient from Zimbabwe, Ms Loyce Mature, said stigmatism was a challenge in African countries. (NAN)

(NAN)