Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I'm Maggie Dichiara. I've been at CHAI
since 2006 and I'm the Country Director in Cambodia.
Our PEDs program began in 2006 when we were
able to offer quite comprehensive support to the government of Cambodia to scale up their pediatric service.
At that point, they were really well underway in launching
Adult ART services, but pediatrics was falling behind.
Beginning in 2007, pediatric ARV formulations, second-line formulations and diagnostic supplies
were supplied by CHAI through UNITAID. That provided a really quick
infusion of resources. Before the pediatric ARV donation,
families would often bring *** infected children to orphanages.
Not because they didn't have parents, but because the
demands of dealing with a sick child were too much to bear.
Once ARVs became available to children in Cambodia,
there was a deep and stabilizing impact, both on the individual children, whose healths were restored, and
also because it enabled other children to not have to go into orphanages because they could become healthy and stay with their families.
This is Basil, who was found
in a health care center along the Thai border after his mother's death.
His mother died, his father had run away. Little Basil was very sick when he came to us. This is
a picture of him when he first came. He had *** stage 4 and serious tuberculosis. As you can see, little Basil
has done much, much better since. When Bill Clinton came in 2006, he was the youngest child
in Cambodia getting ARV medication.
And now he's a healthy little 5 year old running around the village.
Children die without this medicine. With this medicine they live. But they're not only alive, they're thriving
and we're now facing the prospect of sending children to college and vocational school because they're 18, 19 years old and they've survived the disease so far.
The medicine works, but the kids are still coming.
We don't want to keep accepting children
and we don't know how to turn away a sick child. So, we're going to keep growing,
but we're hoping that things stabilize and that
a real prevention of mother to child program here, that we won't keep getting new infections.