Gut microbiome study of children living with HIV in Yaounde, Cameroon

During our routine activities, we have come to realize that from infants diagnosed through EID programme less than 40% of them were initiated on ARV treatment. There are no data on longterm management of a pediatric cohort in Cameroon and few in sub-Saharan African. Further more, few studies have looked at the microbiome contribution in diseases development, ARV response and on over all long term use of ARV in a pediatric population. From these observations, we are interested in constructing a cohort of HIV infected infants from EID and ensure they are on treatment and follow them up until adulthood. Biological samples (blood, stool, urines) will be collected every year or twice per year depending on the assay analyses and analysed in order to describe the microbiome and its dynamics of these children in comparison to exposed non infected and unexposed children. Then the impact of these dynamics will be looked on the virologic, immunologic and the frequency or onset of infectious and non infectious dieases until they reach adulthood. The results obtained from this study will allow to design strategies to keep these children for a long time on the drugs that keep them alive and set a ground to introduce individual management such as the re equilibration of the microbiome, especially the gut microbiome.