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Lack of anti retroviral threaten lives of children with HIV
A pediatrician and head of adolescent HIV and TB clinic at the Komfo Anokye hospital Dr. Anthony Enamel has warned more children with HIV could die or develop resistance to medicine due to lack of pediatric drugs for children.
Speaking to Luv News he said “children are young, they are small and they need special liquid formulation, these are difficult to come by and it is a major challenge”.
Like other countries globally, HIV/AIDS is present in Ghana with an estimated 150,000 people infected with the virus and a prevalence rate of 0.8 percent in 2014.
About 27,000 children under the age of 14 in Ghana are living with HIV with many more being orphaned due to AIDs.
It is estimated that about one million children in Ghana have lost one or both parents due to the disease.
Although the elimination of HIV/AIDS in Ghana seems to be progressing steadily, the current lack of pediatric drug formulation for children has made doctors to resort to dividing adult tablets for children.
Dr. Enamel said “we have a child who weighs 5 kilos and we need a very small fraction of the adult tablet but because we don’t have means of measuring we just improvise”.
He went on to say the situation makes it impossible to give the accurate dosage of medication to the children.
The only option he says is to wait “but of course the disease is spreading and duplicating very fast, the more you wait, the more the consequences are bad: either they die or develop neurological complications when they grow”.
