Many African Children Have HIV Drug Resistance

More than a half of african youngsters have HIV drug resistance. These facts were published in Clinical Infectious Diseases by Silvia Bertagnolio, MD, from WHO department of HIV/AIDS.

The investigators of the research think that the drug resistance to antiretroviral drugs among african youngsters in connected with an expansion of Non-Nucleoside Reverse Transcriptase Inhibitors (NNRTI) for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV. The investigators found that the Global coverage of PMTCT has substantially increased from 50% in 2010 to 77% in five years, according to the article published on healio.com. The investigators also noticed that PMTCT is critical to reducing new HIV infections, which declined 51% among children aged 14 years and younger since 2010.

“Reasons for poor uptake of this policy include lack, until recently, of heat-stable and palatable pediatric formulations of LPV/r, which do not require cold chain until the point of dispensing, and no available fixed-dose combination of LPV/r with a NRTI backbone. The high levels of NNRTI resistance observed in this analysis strongly support the use of a non-NNRTI-containing regimen in children, as recommended by WHO, and reinforce the need to overcome practical barriers to widespread scale-up of PI-based regimens to ensure optimal treatment of HIV-infected children in sub-Saharan Africa. Despite possible reversion to wild type in circulating virus in plasma, proviral DNA containing mutations conferring resistance to NNRTI that were present in transmitted viruses are likely to be archived in latently infected cells and may be expressed in the future under NNRTI selective pressure, thus impacting long-term management,” - commented the investigators of the research.