Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2007. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Mail & Guardian Online - March 14, 2007
Longer life: Far more African babies infected with HIV by their mothers may survive to puberty than previously thought -- but the health services are ill-equipped to deal with HIV-positive teens who need special care.
"The findings are quite extraordinary," says researcher Dr Liz Corbett, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
"The phenomenon of long-term survival is poorly recognised and until recently has been almost positively resisted by the international HIV community because of the strongly held assumptions that survival from birth to adolescence with HIV was so unlikely without treatment as to be negligible. Somewhere around one in 10 infected infants -- and perhaps even as high as one in four -- may survive into late childhood or early adolescence without diagnosis or treatment."
But late diagnosis is likely to have a significant effect on their future health, warns researcher Dr Rashida Ferrand. "A delayed diagnosis means that patients have a higher risk of developing serious opportunistic infections and may have significant and irreversible damage to vital organs ... We also know that antiretroviral therapies are less effective if started in patients with advanced disease."
It is also important to recognise that these children may have already suffered from the indirect effects of HIV, such as orphanhood, impoverishment and the psychological trauma of prolonged illness in parents, argues Dr Ferrand.
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