Maseru, May ____ The Health officials and district representatives met at Maseru on Thursday to turn local evidence and challenges into concrete steps towards eliminating mother-to-child transmission of HIV,Syphilis and hepatitis B

Workshop participants highlighted uneven progress across districts. Some districts are lagging on key indicators while others are showing stronger results in areas like testing and follow up.

Head of Health Education, Mr Baroane Phafoli, said the gap creates an opportunity for other districts to learn from one another. 

A key challenge raised was a weak health education in hard to reach areas,Qualitative data from health promotion groups shows that in other places like Qacha'snek, many patients are defaulting on treatment and care because they lack information.

Strengthening community outreach and health messaging was identified as priority in the action agenda.

workshop discussions also mapped out persistent gaps and solutions across the three diseases. For HIV, incomplete ART register and poor mother-to-baby pairing means some exposed children are missed at birth, with high loss follow up rates. Participants proposed digitizing facilities, task shifting, and strengthening community services to close the gap.

On syphilis,they said that underreporting remains a problem as private facilities lack District Health information software two access and there is no system to capture syphilis still birth, compounded by low screening coverage and inconsistent use of WHO 2016 case definition making syphilis a notifiable disease and improving lab quality were flagged as priorities.

Participants said in hepatitis B, data gaps persist due to missing indicators in the Health Management System, there is no vaccine dose for new born babies, and no tracking of newborns from positive mothers. and the proposed fix is to update HMIS indicators by June this year, train providers, and roll out birth dose vaccines alongside improved testing and reporting tools.

WHO and its partners lead a global public health strategy to ensure that every child has the best chances to start a healthy life, free from preventable disease and that strategy is The Elimination of Mother to child Transmission of Communicable Disease.

Image by UNICEF