LILONGWE, Nov 2 (Reuters) - Malawi opened one of Africa's first modern paediatric AIDS centres on Thursday in what officials said was the first step in dealing with an epidemic that has seen many child victims die for want of treatment. Malawi Health Minister Marjorie Ngaunje said the new Baylor College of Medicine International Paediatric AIDS Initiative would spell hope for the estimated 83,000 Malawi children now living with HIV/AIDS. "We have not had the capacity to help address the complex needs of the thousands of children with HIV in Malawi but now this clinic will help government scale up its activities," she said at the opening of the clinic in the capital Lilongwe. Only about six percent of the 50,000 Malawians now receiving life-saving anti-retroviral drugs from the government are children, who require special drug formulations and monitoring programmes to ensure they remain healthy. Malawi, a country of 12 million people and one of the poorest in the world, is also one of the most severely affected by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Malawi has already lost an estimated one million people to HIV/AIDS, and an estimated 14 percent of adults are infected with the virus. As in many African countries, children have been particularly hard hit. Along with the 83,000 children infected with HIV/AIDS, a further 900,000 have lost one or both parents to the illness and close to 30,000 newborns are infected every year because of government failure to prevent mother to child transmission, according to officials. The Baylor clinic, the first ever in Malawi, is staffed with 13 doctors and aims to treat 1,300 children with HIV by the end of the year. On the first day, 62 children were treated. The $2.2 million centre was funded by the Abbott Fund, a charity which has committed $100 million over 5 years to address critical HIV/AIDS issues in Africa and the developing world.
