Lalitpur, March 6:

The Ministry of Health and Population (MoHP) is formulating a paediatric guideline to guarantee new-born babies and young kids infected with HIV timely medication.

Dr Shyam Sunder Mishra, director at the National Center for AIDs and STD Control (NCASC), said that government was coming up with a guideline to check the spread of HIV in newborn and children.

“Recently, we have detected a number of HIV cases in newborns and young children. The government is formulating a guideline so that timely and right medication can be provided to the children,” said Dr Mishra during the launch of campaign ‘Keeping the promise, fighting AIDS together’.

National Association of People Living with HIV/AIDS, Nepal (NAPN) launched the campaign in collaboration of DFID and UNDP.

“There should be a common strategy, monitoring and supervision in order to make the National work plan on HIV/AIDS a success,” said Dr Mishra.

“Rather than being totally dependent on donor agencies, it would be better if the NGOs request donor agencies to provide technical and financial support instead. The donors should not be able to impose their ideas and programmes,” said Dr Mishra.

Rajiv Kafle, president of National Association of People living with HIV/AIDS (NAPN), said that even the organisations that were not operating due to financial crunch would now be able to provide services to the needy.

“The campaign will help avail the services where it is needed the most ,especially in remote areas where the programmes had not been able to take hold due to the shortage of funds,” Kafle said.

Kafle said that the DFID has provided a grant of $25 million for five years to fight HIV/AIDS in Nepal under the campaign. “The Fast track and challenge fund modality will be used for the campaign,” Kafle added.

Fast Track is an innovative funding modality being adopted to disburse funds rapidly to the grassroots organisations. FT grant is non competitive and is given to organisations under the set criteria while Challenge fund (CF) is given to the groups and organisations of people living with HIV/AIDS across the country, which lack infrastructure and resources to run a group.

UN Management Support Agency is entrusted by the government and donors (DFID, Global Fund and AUSAID) to support the implementation of National HIV/AIDS plan. Navin Pokhrel of Life Line Support group said that merely introducing a programme would not address the problem. The local NGOs should also be trained, he said.