Support HIV/AIDS Treatment for Kids in China

PATS has been extremely fortunate to have Dr. Jessica Haberer on our Board of Directors since its inception. Dr. Haberer worked previously with the Clinton HIV/AIDS Initiative in China where she was a Clinical and Research Advisor to the Chinese Center for Disease Control. She was a leader in the initial rollout of pediatric ARVs across China, as well as the Clinton Pediatric HIV/AIDS Program. In this role she met several of the PATS children and supported their medical care. Jessica now splits her time between Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School in Boston, USA where she continues her work in support of HIV-positive children and adults around the world.

Dr. Haberer has been key to supporting the PATS program. In the early years of PATS she provided medical expertise when we created our bilingual HIV education manual that would become an important go-to information source for our workers. She also reviewed and gave important input to a picture-based manual we put together for illiterate caretakers of HIV-positive children and she has ensured that all surveys and other program documents were medically accurate and ethically appropriate. Most importantly, for several years she has participated in conference calls with our staff in China, answering questions and concerns the workers have about specific children or their parents. These calls were translated by bilingual PATS volunteers and were followed up by e-mails as needed.

An example of questions that the workers recently asked Jessica include the following:

1. A child’s mom just changed to 2nd line medication and her platelet count has drastically decreased. So she switched back to first line drugs. Do you have any suggestions on how to proceed?

2. A child’s mom is on ARV meds and her blood cholesterol level is very high. So she is taking a lot of different medicine to control her cholesterol levels. Will that affect her ARV medication?

3. Many parents asked how come their kids have been taking their ARV meds for a long time, but their CD4 haven't risen very fast. Is there a reason for that? Do ARV meds and CD4 actually correlate?

Dr. Haberer has also been essential to providing advice to several children who were critically ill: one child developed cancer and another was hospitalized with a very low CD4 count and was in need of changing her ARV drugs which PATS supplies from the US. She provided real time advice about how the workers should work with local physicians to respond to these challenging situations. She gave them the support they needed to help families and their doctors make good decisions about their care. While PATS always works with local doctors and the Ministry of Health system, sometimes they do not have the expertise or the time to provide our workers or the PATS children with the one-on-one attention they need. Dr. Haberer has provided PATS workers, children and their families with an important supplement to the care they have available locally and the good health of many of our children and their families is a direct result of her medical support.