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Treating the World; Abbott’s global AIDS programme
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Medicines without doctors to prescribe them or clinics and laboratories in which to treat and monitor individual patients is almost as bad as no medication at all.” |
Strengthening health
care systems
In 2005, the World Health Organisation (WHO) reported that unless urgent investments are made in health systems across the world, most of the health related Millennium development goals
will not be met. The Millennium development goals represent a global partnership that has grown from the commitments and targets established at the world summits of the 1990s. Responding to the world’s main development challenges and to the calls of civil society, the Millennium development goals promote poverty reduction, education, maternal health, gender equality, and aim at combating child mortality, AIDS and other diseases.
The World Health Organisation has cited a lack of health infrastructure as a key barrier to expanding access to HIV treatment in resource-limited settings. The limits of current systems are becoming increasingly apparent as HIV drugs become increasingly available in African countries. Health systems will need adapting to facilitate long-term- rather than just emergency care.
Medicines without doctors to prescribe them or clinics and laboratories in which to treat and monitor individual patients is almost as bad as no medication at all.
Like many countries in Africa, Tanzania has a huge HIV problem. Tanzania plans to eventually offer HIV treatment to 2 million people. Back in 2002, the Abbott Fund and the Government of Tanzania formed a unique public-private partnership, implementing one of the most comprehensive initiatives in Africa to strengthen the country’s health
care system.
Over 80 hospitals from the leading teaching hospital in Dar es Salaam to health centres in the most rural areas are benefiting from a far-reaching programme to modernize their facilities, improve patient and hospital management systems as well as vitally expanding capacity for testing and treatment. In the first six years of the project alone the Abbott Fund has invested more than $50 million in the scheme.
So far more than 7,800 health care workers have been trained to provide HIV care and HIV tests have been provided to test over 180,000 people.
This past summer work began on the first of 23 hospital laboratories to be modernized or newly built across Tanzania. The project will run for the next two years.
The long-term goal of a project
like Tanzania Care is to create a
public/private model that other
countries can adopt to fight their own
HIV epidemics.
Helping children
affected by HIV
HIV is having a devastating effect on the world’s children. By 2010 one in five children in the hardest hit countries will be orphaned by AIDS. There are currently 15 million AIDS orphans in addition to around 2.3 million kids living with HIV in the developing world.
Nine out of ten children with HIV live in sub-Saharan Africa. Abbott has worked hard to expand treatment options for kids with HIV. Abbott’s drug Kaletra (called Aluvia in the developing world) is now available as a reduced strength tablet suitable for positive kids and is recommended by the WHO for children who have experienced previous treatment failure. Since 2001, more than 700,000 children and families affected by AIDS have received services through Abbott Fund programmes.
Abbott works in partnership with UK based Non governmental organization the International HIV and AIDS alliance in Burkina Faso and India to help local organizations integrate child-focused activities into existing HIV prevention and AIDS care programmes. This approach ensures ‘buy in’ from local communities as well as a commitment to sustain the projects long into the future. So far around 20 schools have been renovated in Burkina Faso and Tanzania and countless children have been provided with food and clothing as well as funds for school fees.
The Abbott Fund supported a model paediatric HIV treatment programme that reduced child death rates by 90 percent; this model is now being expanded across the whole of Africa.
A partnership with the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation in Tanzania and Uganda is working to accelerate enrollment of HIV positive children into care and treatment and develop the capacity of health care workers.
Preventing Mother-to-Child
HIV Transmission
The transmission of HIV from a woman to her child during pregnancy or delivery causes the majority of childhood HIV cases in the developing world. An estimated 1,800 become newly infected with HIV each day.
It is possible to prevent the transmission of HIV from a mother to her child by treating the woman and baby with HIV drugs. Testing is the first step in preventing HIV transmission. Over the past five years Abbott donated more than 8 million rapid HIV tests free of charge in 69 developing countries, including all of Africa. Rapid tests produce results in minutes. Once a woman is diagnosed she can be offered free therapy to prevent her child becoming HIV positive.
The Abbott Fund is working with the Catholic Medical Mission Board (CMMB) to provide prevention of mother to child HIV transmission services in 70 faith-based health facilities in six provinces in Kenya. Through the partnership care and treatment will be provided to pregnant women and exposed babies and infants.
Abbott Fund’s partnership with Family Health International in Malawi and Tanzania focuses on the reduction of HIV transmission from mother to child; increasing access to comprehensive care and treatment for HIV positive children; and support of the government in creating an enabling environment through policy formulation and guidelines on paediatric HIV and AIDS management and ensuring the sustainability of scale-up over the life of project.
Expanding access to
testing and treatment
Abbott previously manufactured a rapid HIV antibody test called the Determine test. It made over 100 million tests available at no profit or free of charge. Abbott’s HIV medicines are broadly available at significantly reduced prices or at no profit in the developing world.
Taken together, these initiatives which combine providing treatment and care with skills and infrastructure building are a powerful attempt to improve the lives of people living in the most destitute of circumstances. But the lasting legacy has to be the community development projects, that skill people up to take control of their lives despite their circumstances. n
© BHM |