CARITAS Australia has called on the Australian pharmaceutical company, Roche, to develop paediatric HIV medications, which could drastically reduce childhood mortality and the prevalence of HIV/AIDS throughout the developing world.
The Catholic aid and development agency made the call on World Health Day, April 7.
Caritas reported that nearly 300,000 children would die this year from diseases related to HIV/AIDS because life-saving treatments remained largely inaccessible to children living in impoverished communities.
It said that, with limited access to effective Highly Active Anti-Retroviral Therapy (HAART), and myriad social barriers to overcome, children were disproportionately vulnerable to the disease.
“Despite much talk and action on HIV, we’ve seen that the needs of children in particular are still neglected,” Caritas Australia chief executive officer Jack de Groot said. “A major issue is the lack of child-friendly fixed-dose combinations of anti-retroviral drugs.
“In many developing countries care-givers have to use tablets designed for adults and break them up. Whilst there are some syrups available, they are difficult to handle, costly to transport and hard to store without refrigeration.
“In addition anti-retroviral treatment for children is currently three times more expensive than adult formulations.”
In 2009 Caritas Internationalis launched the international campaign: “HAART for Children: greater Access to Paediatric HIV and TB testing and treatment”, calling on governments and pharmaceutical companies to provide more testing and enable appropriate treatment for nearly 15 million children who live with HIV/AIDS.
A Roche spokesperson said the company has been at the forefront of efforts to combat HIV infection and AIDS for more than 20 years.
“Challenges in our HIV programs in development have led us to the conclusion that we would not offer physicians and patients sufficient improvement over currently-available options, and therefore do not warrant further progression,” the spokesperson said.
“Since we must focus our research and development efforts on areas in which we feel we can deliver substantial improvements over existing medicines, we will no longer be active in research of HIV.
“Roche will continue to optimise and support the appropriate clinical use of our medicines that are already on the market for the treatment of HIV-related disease, incorporating the needs of children or heavily pre-treated patients. In addition, we will continue to actively support people living with HIV in resource-limited countries with programs that increase access to many of our HIV medications.”
Roche Australia is seeking a meeting with Mr de Groot to discuss the issue.
