Bristol-Myers sending AIDS doctors to Africa
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U.S. drug giant Bristol-Myers Squibb Co. is sending 250 pediatric doctors over the next five years to sub-Saharan Africa to fight HIV/AIDS, part of a growing push to target infants and children in the battle against the epidemic.
The initiative is a joint venture with the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and was announced Wednesday at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto.
The United Nations AIDS agency UNAIDS estimates that 2.3 million children under 15 years of age were living with HIV in 2005, nearly 90 percent of whom live in sub-Saharan Africa.
The venture, part of the Secure the Future campaign launched by Bristol-Myers in 1999, will also include a program to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV and the opening of children’s clinics.
Medecins Sans Frontieres, also known as Doctors Without Borders, called this week for a refocusing on mother-to-child HIV transmissions, pointing to a lack of affordable pediatric treatments and proper diagnostic tools.
On Tuesday, former President Clinton called on policymakers to push for more pediatric treatments, and said he thought funding for pediatric medicine would become a greater priority over the next two years.
Mark Kline, president of the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative, said the push towards pediatric treatment represented a “hopeful and exciting” time for pediatric AIDS work.
“We have an opportunity to scale up these programs and to see hundreds of thousands or millions of children benefit over the coming years,” he told a news conference.
Peter Singer, senior scientist with the University of Toronto’s McLaughlin Centre for Molecular Medicine, said private sector initiatives such as Secure the Future are necessary due to the sheer magnitude of the AIDS epidemic.
“HIV/AIDS is really the mother of all ethical challenges, he said.
“It’s not purely one that the government sector or civil society alone can tackle, and the private sector needs to be a constructive contributor.”
As part of the project, 50 pediatric AIDS doctors will arrive in clinics by next Monday to begin one-year assignments, the kickoff to a campaign to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
Bristol-Myers, which has so far committed about $150 million to the Secure the Future program, including $32 million to the latest initiative, will send 50 doctors each year over the next five years.
Baylor is contributing $10 million to the project.
The doctors will train local health care personnel, and are expected to treat an estimated 80,000 children.
Secure the Future has already seen strong results with its network of children’s clinical centers, which Kline says has brought down death rates and hospitalization rates.
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