CAPE TOWN — SA is making tentative headway in its efforts to protect children from HIV, but much more needs to be done to save lives, a new scorecard from the Catch network shows. The network is an alliance of organisations that work with children and HIV.
“When it comes to children and HIV, we are making some progress, but it is insufficient,” Mark Heywood, deputy chairman of the South African National AIDS Council, said yesterday.
“No one can assume that because (former health minister) Manto (Tshabalala-Msimang) and (former president Thabo) Mbeki are gone, we are doing well, because we are not,” he said.
The scorecard measures progress towards the government’s targets for preventing infections and caring for children affected by HIV, which are detailed in its HIV/AIDS National Strategic Plan.
It shows SA is on track to meet its 2011 treatment targets for women and children, as well as those for preventing infection among teenage girls and providing drugs to HIV-positive pregnant women to reduce the likelihood of transmitting the virus to their babies.
For example, the plan says 93% of teenage girls visiting antenatal clinics in 2011 should be HIV-negative; in 2007 (the most recent year for which data were available) 87% of adolescents tested were HIV- negative, up from 84% in 2005.
The director of the Children’s Rights Centre, Cati Vawda, questioned whether these targets were sufficiently bold, warning that progress towards the goals was no cause for complacency. The figures masked the difficulties still facing many children, she said.
The scorecard also shows SA is below target regarding the number of children under the age of one who are getting the child support grant, and that there are too few social workers to provide the services promised by the Children’s Act. Last year , 38% of children under the age of one were getting the grant, but about 60% of children “would probably have qualified”, says the publication.
Vawda said monitoring SA’s efforts to deal with children and HIV was hamstrung by patchy data. It had proved impossible to determine what proportion of babies born to HIV-positive mothers were free of the virus at three months, and how many children who had been raped were able to get antiretroviral medicines to reduce their risk of getting HIV.
kahnt@bdfm.co.za