Contrary to popular opinion, children are not simply little adults. HIV, even during the earliest stages of infection, can severely affect a child's development, whether related to physical growth, psychological evolvement, or emotional well being.
Children have different immune systems than adults. HIV rapidly impairs a child's immune system ability to control common childhood infections, such as bacterial-associated lung and ear infections and viral infections like chicken pox. HIV also prevents the immune system from producing memory cells which, in adults, help ward off life-threatening infections like Pneumocystis pneumonia (PCP), Mycobacterium avium complex (MAC), and cytomegalovirus (CMV). What's more, many HIV-infected children are born to mothers who abused alcohol and/or drugs while pregnant, which can worsen problems caused by HIV infection.
Researchers have shown that HIV-infected babies tend to have higher viral loads than adults, which can sometimes reach millions of HIV-RNA copies in a single milliliter of blood. As a result, the lessons we have learned treating adults with HIV hold true for children infected with the virus: a powerful combination of drugs should be used to lower a child's viral load to the lowest possible level.
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