Title

New developments in paediatric and adolescent care

Code

MOSY08

Session Type

Symposia Session

Venue

Palacio de Valparaíso 1

Date Time

Monday 22 July, 14:30 - 16:00

Chair:

Ann Chahroudi, Emory University School of Medicine, United States

The session will have a mixed format, combining updates on current approaches and directions for paediatric and adolescent care with dialogue and discussion about real-world, practical implications. It will ideally include the voices of affected individuals (a US woman who could not breastfeed her child, an adolescent, a parent of a child with HIV) either in person or via video, introducing the topic by asking a question or following the relevant speaker with questions and commentary.

14:30 MOSY0801	Introduction

14:32 MOSY0802	The price of milk in high-income countries: Is it time for women living with HIV to be involved in decision-making about breastfeeding? Lealah Pollock, University of California San Francisco, United States	Slides

14:52 MOSY0803	Lost in translation? What is U=U in the adolescent context globally? Lee Fairlie, Wits Reproductive Health & HIV Institute (Wits RHI), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa, South Africa	Slides

15:12 MOSY0804	Engaging young African women by appealing to their DREAMS Nina Hasen, PSI, United States	Slides

15:32 MOSY0805	Will I be OK? Predicting and preventing longitudinal co-morbidities of HIV among paediatric and adolescent populations Irene Njuguna, Kenyatta National Hospital, Kenya	Slides

15:52 MOSY0806	Questions and answers

15:57 MOSY0807	Closing remarks

AUTHOR

Juan Louis Mosqueda Gómez

SUMMARY

The session had two major parts, the first part to talk about the role that HIV-infected women should have on the possibility to breastfeed their children and the second part about the difficulties in adolescent women for HIV prevention, diagnosis and retention in care.

HIGHLIGHTS

Lealah Pollock talked about the rights of HIV infected women to participate in the decisions about breastfeeding, with ethical considerations based on scientific evidence on the risks and benefits. Lee Fairlie, Nina Hasen, talked about the problems for HIV prevention, diagnosis and retention in care among adolescent women. Adolescents are not likely to access to clinic-based testing leading to a high proportion of adolescent girls remain undiagnosed. Adolescents could be more worried about the love or motherhood than the HIV risk. We can use U=U as the strongest message to improve adolescent HIV and ART outcome. Irene Njuguna reminds us about the importance of early diagnosis of HIV in pediatric patients because early treatment may improve outcomes and avoid the damage associated with HIV despite ART. Early treatment could help pediatric patients to get cognitive development similar to the one observed among uninfected children.

CRITICAL ASSESSMENT

It was an important session, because the speakers raised awareness about the need of multi-layered and scalable efforts to improve HIV diagnosis among adolescent women, legal barriers related to age of consent for HIV testing must be removed. Better understanding about the teen biology, psichology and sociology is needed to create programs for HIV diagnosis and retention in care for this population, implementation of youth friendly services are also important. Finally, they consider the relevance that the improved antiretroviral formulations for treatment and prevention should include children and adolescents, because adequate formulations for them are still lacking.