Speaking to NBS Television Dr. Ponsiano Kalebu revealed that a recent study among children living with HIV had revealed that 50% of them had developed drug resistance. “What we did is looking at children who are born under the Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission at a time before what we call option B+ when mothers were getting one drug on Nevirapine or AZT. Some of the children were born we realized were already had resistance to some of these drugs.”

Dr. Kalebu explained that most of the children who had presented with the resistance had been introduced to Anti-Retroviral Therapy before conception. “That is the reason why it is recommended that in these children are given drugs that contain protein exhibitors, when you give these drugs that we give other people it will not work because many of these children have resistance because the reason is that they have been exposed to small amounts of the drug either before they are born or during the time of their birth and if they are exposed to the virus it leads to resistance because it leads to some optimal dose. But that was before option we call option B+, now as you know anytime you find a mother who is HIV infected and pregnant, they are started on a combination therapy HART. That has prevented transmission to the baby and we are expecting to see less resistance and we are about to start a study now to look at these children since the introduction of Option B+."

Over 2,600 children are born with HIV in Uganda annually with most of them enrolled on Anti-Retroviral drugs. “I think the major risk is that their options for drugs are narrowed, there are very few drugs they can use but what the country has done and what WHO has done is in children we don’t use some of these drugs that are likely to be resistant but we add on a drug that is normally used as the second line that is the protein exhibitor and we use that for children.” Dr. Kalebu said that more research needed to be done to see the fate of these children. The current studies revealed that many of these children could not be treated with line one medicines hence the need for line two which is not affordable by many people in countries like Uganda.