Some African babies with AIDS get anti-retroviral therapy

GABORONE, Botswana — Four years ago, Refilwe sat in a hospital room watching over her tiny AIDSwasted baby daughter and prepared for the end.

‘‘ That Christmas Day I was looking at her and thinking: Tomorrow, God will be taking care of my baby,’’ she said.

Now, Jennifer is a lively, inquisitive little girl, clambering onto her doctor’s examination table to try on his rubber gloves.

Anti- retroviral medicines can give the youngest AIDS sufferers a chance to grow up healthy, but doctors and activists say most are being left behind in the drive to scale up treatment on the world’s most infected continent.

An estimated 2.2 million children globally are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, according to the United Nations, which launched a campaign to fight the disease in children ahead of World AIDS Day on Thursday.

Anti- retroviral therapy has allowed many of those infected in wealthy nations to reach adulthood and in some cases start families of their own. But treatment remains out of reach for the overwhelming majority in sub- Saharan Africa — home to more than 85 percent of all children under 15 living with the disease.

Fewer than 1 percent of infected children globally are receiving the life- prolonging drugs. Without them, most will die before their fifth birthday.

Botswana, the first African nation to pledge to give free AIDS medicine to all who need it, is one of the few treating children through the public health system.

It boasts the continent’s first center devoted to pediatric AIDS, operated by