Texas Children's Global Health HIV-AIDS

In 1996, Romania experienced a high occurrence of pediatric HIV infection resulting from untested blood transfusions. Romanian children were dying from HIV infection at the time when new drugs—highly active antiretroviral treatment—were revolutionizing HIV/AIDS treatment in the Western world. Texas Children’s Hospital was leading the way as one of the first to start treating pediatric HIV. Dr. Mark Kline visited Romania to assess this crisis and decided that children around the world should have access to the same type of care and treatment that they receive in Houston.

With initial support from Houston’s Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Abbott Fund, and AmeriCares, the first Center of Excellence (COE) in the Texas Children’s Global Health Network was created in Romania in 2001. Deaths among children with HIV declined from 15% to 1% and provided the first proof of concept for providing large-scale HIV treatment to children in a limited-resource setting.

In 2000, Botswana President Festus Mogae declared to the UN General Assembly that due to the AIDS pandemic his people were “faced with extinction.” With funding through Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Secure the Future program, the Botswana-Baylor Children’s Clinical COE opened in 2003 and treated 1,200 children that year. The model proved to be a success and garnered attention from other governments, leading to Lesotho, Eswatini, Malawi, Tanzania, and Uganda dedicating six new centers in five years.

Providing access to care and treatment was only part of the solution. Africa and Latin America faced a severe shortage of healthcare providers. The Texas Children’s Global Health Corps was formed in 2006, initially as the Pediatric AIDS Corps, to provide pediatric specialists to treat patients and build the capacity of local healthcare workers at Texas Children’s Global Health Network sites. With nearly 200 physicians deployed since inception, the Global Health Corps supported the Network’s expansion beyond HIV treatment and enabled trainings and capacity-building efforts impacting more than 100,000 healthcare workers in limited-resource settings in Africa, Latin America, and Romania.

Today, the Texas Children’s Global Health Network provides care to more than 350,000 children, women, and families through public-private partnerships in more than a dozen countries and remains the largest provider of pediatric HIV care and treatment in the world. This global child health network provides a framework for some of the best maternal and child health specialists in the world to share best practices and resources in care and treatment, medical education, and clinical and operational research focused on HIV/AIDS, tuberculosis, malaria, malnutrition, neglected tropical diseases, and other conditions impacting the health and well-being of children and families worldwide.