A workshop to this effect is going on at the Chantal Biya Research Centre in Yaounde.
Professor Luc Montagnier, co-founder of HIV and 2008 Nobel Prize winner in medicine, along side other renowned researchers are currently discussing better ways to manage people living with HIV. This is within the framework of an international training workshop on the management of Paediatric AIDS and HIV/hepatitis B co-infected patients which opened yesterday, April 24 at the “Chantal Biya” International Reference Centre for Research on HIV and AIDS Prevention and Management (CIRCB).
Taking place under the patronage of the First Lady of Cameroon, Mrs Chantal Biya, participants at the workshop will critically look at some of the difficulties that exist in the treatment and biological monitoring of children with HIV especially before the age of six months where CD4 counts, a component of biological monitoring of adults HIV, are not usable. One of the coordinators, Dr Judith Torimiro said the first session of the workshop focuses on people who live with HIV and Hepatitis B virus because there are major challenges in their response to the drugs that they take and the cost. Dr Torimiro explained that before a clinician takes care of a child suffering from HIV, the latter needs to be diagnosed. “There have been major challenges of what is available in terms of diagnosing children born from HIV positive mothers”, she said.
For four days, Prof Montagnier and other experts from Chad, Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, Italy, France and Cameroon will share experiences on scientific advances and other research areas to further improve the healthcare of HIV kids and co-infections. So far CIRCB has focused its action primarily on Paediatric HIV/AIDS and factors related to the disease spread. The administrator of CIRCB, Dr Pierre Joseph Fouda said the Centre is a reference one where children born of HIV positive mothers get tested as early as six weeks of age through a technology in which a little amount of blood is dried on a filter paper and tested by one of the most effective techniques affordable. The centre already covers six of the ten regions in Cameroon in which specimens of children are sent from all over the country. The Centre also has the possibility of testing the viral load of the children and drug resistance. Dr Fouda said these are some of the contributions of the centre in the management of children living with HIV. Such results have so far helped clinicians modify the treatment of HIV to children. This expertise and many more has enabled CIRCB to organise and host the current workshop.
