RWANDA: Need to incorporate nutrition into kids' HIV programmes

By, IRIN PlusNews, December 7, 2006

NAIROBI - Nearly 45 percent of HIV-positive Rwandan children under five years old are severely malnourished, delegates at a recent paediatric conference on HIV/AIDS heard.

Josephine Kayumba, a nutritionist with Rwanda's Treatment and Research AIDS Centre, who attended the conference in the capital, Kigali, told IRIN/PlusNews that "the nutrition aspect is not well thought out in HIV/AIDS care and treatment. The sector does not receive the sufficient financial and political support it deserves, despite the impact its interventions can have."

She said the small central African nation suffered from "unstable" climatic conditions, which caused seasonal food insecurity in some parts of the country, leading to high rates of malnutrition.

About 23,000 children are born to HIV-positive mothers each year and about 80 percent of Rwanda's 9 million people live on US$2 or less a day.

The government runs programmes for therapeutic feeding, provides training in infant feeding options and gives food support to breastfeeding mothers; nongovernmental organisations also have feeding schemes for undernourished children, but there are very few specific programmes catering for those who are HIV-positive.

According to Girma Makonnen, information officer for the United Nations World Food Programme in Rwanda, "We do not have any special programmes for HIV-positive children, but if they are malnourished then they are eligible to receive supplementary or therapeutic feeding at our feeding centres around the country."

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