• News
    • Latest news
    • News search
    • Health
    • Finance
    • Food
    • Career news
    • Content series
    • Try Devex Pro
  • Jobs
    • Job search
    • Post a job
    • Employer search
    • CV Writing
    • Upcoming career events
    • Try Career Account
  • Funding
    • Funding search
    • Funding news
  • Talent
    • Candidate search
    • Devex Talent Solutions
  • Events
    • Upcoming and past events
    • Partner on an event
  • Post a job
  • About
      • About us
      • Membership
      • Newsletters
      • Advertising partnerships
      • Devex Talent Solutions
      • Contact us
Join DevexSign in
Join DevexSign in

News

  • Latest news
  • News search
  • Health
  • Finance
  • Food
  • Career news
  • Content series
  • Try Devex Pro

Jobs

  • Job search
  • Post a job
  • Employer search
  • CV Writing
  • Upcoming career events
  • Try Career Account

Funding

  • Funding search
  • Funding news

Talent

  • Candidate search
  • Devex Talent Solutions

Events

  • Upcoming and past events
  • Partner on an event
Post a job

About

  • About us
  • Membership
  • Newsletters
  • Advertising partnerships
  • Devex Talent Solutions
  • Contact us
  • My Devex
  • Update my profile % complete
  • Account & privacy settings
  • My saved jobs
  • Manage newsletters
  • Support
  • Sign out
Latest newsNews searchHealthFinanceFoodCareer newsContent seriesTry Devex Pro
    • News
    • HIV and AIDS

    USAID chief: Put maternal and childhood HIV on the map

    HIV diagnosis in children remains a major gap for the global health community, and the disparity between adult and childhood treatment is growing. Can better mapping point the way forward? Rajiv Shah thinks so.

    By Michael Igoe // 25 June 2014
    A nurse takes dried blood spot samples from an infant to test for HIV in a clinic in Malawi. HIV diagnosis in children remains a major gap for the global health community. Photo by: James Pursey / Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation / USAID

    The global health community could be “underreporting and under-recognizing” HIV prevalence as a cause of child death due to a growing gap between child and adult diagnosis and treatment, according to an expert panel who spoke in Washington, D.C. on Tuesday.

    That under-recognition creates the “insidious effect” of less political and financial support for HIV programs that target children, Chip Lyons, president and CEO of the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, said at an event honoring the organization’s twenty-fifth anniversary.

    One possible solution, U.S. Agency for International Development Administrator Rajiv Shah suggested, would be to invest more in mapping so global health programs and the national and sub-national governments they support can better “understand the market” for the services they seek to provide.

    If donors and organizations can use mapping and data visualizations to identify where pregnant mothers and babies are not being served for HIV, Shah explained, then they can probably assume those populations are in need of a variety of other health services — many of which are complicated by the immune system deficiencies posed by HIV.

    The USAID chief pointed out that with a better understanding and better visualizations of how and where maternal and child deaths occur, the health community can draw on the broad bipartisan and global support that has grown up around HIV programs — in particular, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief — to use HIV diagnostics and childhood antiretroviral treatments as a “point of the spear” for an integrated package of health interventions that preferentially target women and children.

    Deborah Birx, the Obama administration’s new global AIDS coordinator, found Shah’s mapping suggestion so compelling that she promised to leave the panel and get to work on building out PEPFAR’s mapping tools.

    “We will go back today and work on that,” Birx said, calling the launch of a new mapping effort a “key announce-able” for an event on Wednesday which will highlight other programmatic shifts in USAID’s and its partners’ maternal and child health interventions.

    Despite PEPFAR’s and the Global Fund’s advances in the fight against HIV and AIDS, which Michael Gerson, the Washington Post columnist who moderated the panel, referred to as a “great success of science as a humane enterprise,” 58 percent of eligible adults receive antiretroviral treatments, while only 28 percent of eligible children do. 3.2 million children are currently living with HIV, and 2 million of them do not have access to treatment.

    Children can be more difficult to diagnose, and the stigma associated with HIV in many parts of the world often dissuades parents from seeking testing and treatment.

    That means, according to Lyons, that many of the children we believe to be dying of causes like diarrhea, pneumonia, and infections, are actually unreported and undiagnosed victims of HIV. If so, estimates placing HIV as the cause of 3 percent of under-five child mortality are actually too low, and could contribute to insufficient political support for childhood HIV funding, she added.

    Read more on U.S. aid reform online, and subscribe to The Development Newswire to receive top international development headlines from the world’s leading donors, news sources and opinion leaders — emailed to you FREE every business day.

    • Global Health
    Printing articles to share with others is a breach of our terms and conditions and copyright policy. Please use the sharing options on the left side of the article. Devex Pro members may share up to 10 articles per month using the Pro share tool ( ).

    About the author

    • Michael Igoe

      Michael Igoe@AlterIgoe

      Michael Igoe is a Senior Reporter with Devex, based in Washington, D.C. He covers U.S. foreign aid, global health, climate change, and development finance. Prior to joining Devex, Michael researched water management and climate change adaptation in post-Soviet Central Asia, where he also wrote for EurasiaNet. Michael earned his bachelor's degree from Bowdoin College, where he majored in Russian, and his master’s degree from the University of Montana, where he studied international conservation and development.

    Search for articles

    Related Jobs

    • Individual Consultant: Digital Health Interoperability Expert
      Laos | East Asia and Pacific
    • Individual Consultant: Regional Research Agenda and Policy Recommendations on Climate Change, Food Systems and Health
      Seoul, Korea, South | Korea, South | East Asia and Pacific
    • Senior Program Officer – Technical Support Units (TSU)
      Abidjan, Cote d Ivoire | Cote d Ivoire | West Africa
    • See more

    Most Read

    • 1
      Opinion: Mobile credit, savings, and insurance can drive financial health
    • 2
      FCDO's top development contractors in 2024/25
    • 3
      Strengthening health systems by measuring what really matters
    • 4
      Opinion: India’s bold leadership in turning the tide for TB
    • 5
      Reigniting momentum for maternal, newborn, and child health

    Trending

    Financing for Development Conference

    The Trump Effect

    Newsletters

    Related Stories

    Accelerating Action: Sponsored by World Child CancerOpinion: UHC must start somewhere — why not childhood cancer?

    Opinion: UHC must start somewhere — why not childhood cancer?

    Global HealthOpinion: Ensuring oxygen access is essential to achieving health for all

    Opinion: Ensuring oxygen access is essential to achieving health for all

    • News
    • Jobs
    • Funding
    • Talent
    • Events

    Devex is the media platform for the global development community.

    A social enterprise, we connect and inform over 1.3 million development, health, humanitarian, and sustainability professionals through news, business intelligence, and funding & career opportunities so you can do more good for more people. We invite you to join us.

    • About us
    • Membership
    • Newsletters
    • Advertising partnerships
    • Devex Talent Solutions
    • Post a job
    • Careers at Devex
    • Contact us
    © Copyright 2000 - 2025 Devex|User Agreement|Privacy Statement