Dear Patrick (so please call me Guido),
for your info, we are in the process to start a field evaluation in children in South Africa, but the target age will be between 2-10 years old. Also in this case I believe that this will be a very important study, specially taking in consideration how difficult is to keep blood from Child and specially if we think that until in the VCT centre are offer only typical blood test only few child will be really tested for HIV.
The real issue in testing the infant (and not child) is mainly linked to the fact that specially at the beginning, until the child immunosystem is not completely developed, a possible HIV positive results of the child ,is due to the Antibody that the child got from her mother and not to a real HIV reaction of the child himself. So it is really impossible to establish if a possible positivity for HIV was really acquire from the Child or is only due to the Antibody set that the mother gave to child with a typical Antibody based test (as the EIA or Rapid test).
For your information I just send a mail to Roberto de La Tour Laboratory Advisor at MSF, due to the fact that already in the past I was in contact with MSF, and so I hope also the get a reply from him.
Obviously I am looking forward to get your feedback from MSF Germany too so in case I will be happy to have a direct contact with them.
Please keep me posted.
Regards.
Guido.
AI
