New UN-backed initiative aims to expand HIV programmes for mothers, children

A new $100 million initiative by major foundations will expand the scope of mother and child HIV programmes, the head of the United Nations AIDS agency said today.

"This is in itself an extraordinary achievement - how we can move mountains," Dr. Peter Piot, Executive Director of the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) said of the collaborative nature of the five-year project that would extend the care provided by existing mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) programmes in developing countries.

Called MTCT-Plus, the programme was the direct result of UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call to action and of the General Assembly special session earlier this year, Dr. Piot said.

Mr. Piot was joined at a press conference at UN Headquarters in New York by Gordon Conway, President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Allan Rosenfeld, Dean of the Mailman School of Public Health of Columbia University in New York, which was coordinating the project.

According to Mr. Rosenfeld, the programme would build on the experience of the MCTC projects that were reducing the enormous number of infants infected with HIV through their mothers, some 600,000 every year in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. Many of those children, however, soon become orphans.

The MTCT-Plus programme would develop protocols to treat those mothers as well, Mr. Rosenfeld added. It would focus first on Sub-Saharan Africa, but would also be working in Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean.

The 100 or so existing MTCT-prevention sites in Africa, from which the pilot sites for MTCT-Plus would be chosen, were administered by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF), the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation, Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) and other organizations.