HEALTH-ROMANIA: A New Chance for Children with AIDS

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Marian Chiriac

BUCHAREST, Jul 3 2003 (IPS) - Fifteen-year-old Nicu Popescu (not his real name) has written a long list of gifts he wants, including new shoes and a football T- shirt. He also wants to be an airplane pilot, but who knows whether that wish can come true.

Nicu, a seemingly healthy boy with big, blue eyes and thick, dark hair, lives in one of the saddest places in the country. He and his friends – some 60 in all – live in Floarea Soarelui (Sun Flower), a hostel for AIDS-infected children close to a hospital in capital Bucharest.

The rooms are fairly well equipped and maintained. There is a TV set, there are books, and an outside playground. But the children cannot go out, and they have the same playmates. Many were abandoned by their parents; but some do have family members visiting them.

"My mother abandoned me when I was four months old," Nicu says. "Sometimes I wonder who she is, but I don’t know if I could love her after she left me."

Petre, 14, one of the most sociable youngsters at the hostel, can barely write his name. He never got the chance to learn to read and write. But he shares everyone else’s dream, that at least one of the children should graduate from the hospital’s school, and enter the world outside the fenced compound.

"That is our great hope", he says. But he knows that will not happen soon, and he knows it may never happen.

Most of the children here are in the last stages of AIDS. Many are noticeably short or underweight. Their predicament is all too visible.

And this is after everything has become much better.

Just over a decade ago, the world was shocked by the conditions in Romania’s orphanages and child-care facilities.

After communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu was overthrown and executed in 1989, people got to see the appalling squalor in which some children infected with HIV were kept locked away in rooms.

Romanian orphanages were crammed, even by the standards of communist states, because Ceausescu had banned contraception, and decreed that women should have at least four children. Many poor women simply abandoned babies in hospital after giving birth.

Today those large institutions that sought to serve Ceausescu’s plans for state care for orphans and abandoned children are gone.

There are still 50,000 children in institutional care in Romania, but the institutions are smaller. Tens of thousands of healthy children could leave because they were adopted.

The health system – which created the AIDS epidemic in the first place by using unsterilised needles and giving transfusions of untested blood – has improved.

That still leaves Romania with more than 8,000 children infected with HIV and AIDS, about half of such children in Europe. The children have to occupy their own separate world. Parents of healthy children will not let these children attend normal schools.

Romania has succeeded in containing infection among the children by improving sanitation, and adopting safe procedures at last with blood transfusions and injections. But 4,000 Romanian children with AIDS have died, and the count will not stop there.

The emphasis at hospices these days is to provide the best possible care and a stimulating environment.

"We have very good supervision for the children and also for abandoned children," says Claudia Catana from the non-governmental organisation Romanian Angel Appeal which manages Floarea Soarelui.

The organisation has also carried out educational projects for medical personnel because many nurses and even doctors do not know exactly how HIV spreads.

But the local groups could not exist without financial support from international charities. U.S. and European drug companies sell anti-retrovirals in Romania at sharply reduced prices.

The monthly cost of care per child in a country where people earn on average 120 dollars a month is about 1300 dollars. Of that almost 1,000 dollars is spent on the medicines.

Despite Romania’s dismal past and its economic hardships, Romania now has one of the best HIV and AIDS treatment programmes in Europe.

"Mainly due to help from outside, Romania has the largest percentage of patients undergoing the most advanced ‘triple combination’ therapy in Eastern Europe," says Petre Calistru, manager of Victor Babes Hospital for Infectious Diseases. "And the results are visible: ten years ago, the average life expectancy for a child with AIDS was three to six months. Now it is almost six years."

Some of those children may graduate into the outside world after all.