Centers

A cross continent collaboration between the International Center for AIDS Care and Treatment Programs (ICAP) at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and South Africa’s Stellenbosch University, called the South-to-South Partnership (S2S), is training African health professionals in pediatric HIV treatment.

Since the launch of S2S in 2006, more than 400 healthcare workers—from Nigeria, Ethiopia, Zambia, Rwanda and elsewhere—have come to Stellenbosch for training.

“The idea was to train people who were going to bring this knowledge back to their own programs,” says Elaine Abrams, MD, professor of Epidemiology at the Mailman School and senior research director at ICAP, responsible for developing and implementing pediatric and perinatal prevention initiatives. Rather than import physicians from the West for the training, S2S taps local HIV expertise in South Africa, an epicenter of the AIDS epidemic. ICAP works with Ministries of Health and national AIDS programs to identify doctors and nurses from programs in countries where ICAP supports HIV prevention, care, and treatment services - and who would most benefit from the training - to participate in the initiative.

Low-income countries face numerous challenges in providing high-quality pediatric HIV care, including scarcities of pediatricians and anti-HIV medications, as well as weak underlying health systems. In 2008, about 230,000 children died of AIDS-related causes in resource-poor settings. That same year, an estimated 430,000 babies and children were newly infected with HIV, about 16 percent of all new infections.