Via The New Humanitarian, a horror story: UN launches emergency response to contain Pakistan HIV epidemic. Excerpt:
The discovery of an HIV outbreak among hundreds of children in Pakistan has spurred an international response and put a spotlight on healthcare and treatment practices in a country already facing a fast-rising epidemic.
This month, the World Health Organisation started rolling out a $1 million emergency response, but medication shortages are already posing a challenge as responders try to contain the outbreak.
More than 800 people – over 80 percent of them children – have tested positive for HIV since April in Larkana district, north of Karachi, according to Dr. Sikandar Memon, project director for the provincial government of Sindh’s AIDS control programme.
Health officials say poor infection control, including the re-use of syringes, may be the primary cause of the outbreak. Local officials initially pointed a finger at a single doctor who worked with children.
But medical experts say the problem may be more widespread, underscoring a lack of public awareness about HIV risks and prevention methods in Pakistan, which has the second-fastest-rising HIV epidemic in Asia and the Pacific after the Philippines, according to UNAIDS.
The WHO is treating the outbreak as a Grade 2 emergency, indicating “moderate” public health consequences – the same internal classification used for aid agency efforts for Cyclone Idai in southern Africa and in Afghanistan, where aid workers struggle to bring healthcare to hundreds of thousands of people displaced by conflict.
Its plan, which will be carried out with the government, NGOs, and other UN agencies, calls for resources to treat up to 5,000 patients in Larkana, screen as many as 150,000 people, and reach 1.5 million people in the wider community with HIV education.
But the surge in new cases means there’s a sudden shortage of the paediatric antiretroviral medication used to treat HIV in children. Before the Larkana outbreak, only 1,200 children in Pakistan were being treated for HIV, according to the WHO.
As of this week, less than half of the newly diagnosed people in Larkana were receiving treatment. Last week, the WHO warned that there was only enough antiretroviral medication for 240 children through mid-July.
“This means that only nine more children can be enrolled for treatment using available stocks, leaving many other children who have tested positive without treatment,” the agency warned last week.
