HEALTH-BALKANS: When AIDS Catches Them Young

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Aug 8 2003 (IPS) - Stanko is a lively boy from Belgrade, due to start his fifth grade of elementary school on Sep. 1.

The fifth grade is a turning point for pupils. They get different teachers for new subjects. Good grades are not easy.

But Stanko, 11, can hardly wait for the change.

It will mean real school and real friends for the first time, though in a neighbourhood far from home. No one will know there the darkest secret of his life that took away his normal childhood. Stanko is an HIV positive child.

“We hope he’ll have a fresh start,” says Karlo Boras, who heads the youth branch of the Yugoslav Association for Fighting AIDS (JAZAS). “It was an enormous effort by friendly people who helped this transfer, so that Stanko can begin a new, non-segregated life. He is such a brave boy.”

JAZAS is the leading non-governmental organization (NGO) that deals with HIV/AIDS in what used to be the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, turned into Serbia and Montenegro several months ago.

Boras says Stanko’s case is typical of an HIV positive child in the region.

“Former Yugoslavia, meaning Croatia, Bosnia, Macedonia and Serbia and Montenegro, can be described as an area with a high level of stigmatisation, discrimination and marginalisation of HIV (human immunodeficiency virus) positive people and people suffering from AIDS (acquired immune deficiency syndrome),” Boras says.

“This especially goes for children being excommunicated from normal life,” Boras says. “This leads to serious psychological consequences, as if those children have not suffered enough.”

Stanko was born HIV positive, the infection coming from his mother who developed full symptoms of AIDS and died shortly after giving birth. The mother was an intravenous drug user (IDU), infected through multiple use of dirty syringes.

Stanko’s father also died of AIDS, after being infected by his wife. The boy was six at the time. The child was raised by grandparents.

“That is the most common way in the region,” Boras says. “Due to traditional family bonds, grandparents or other healthy relatives take care of HIV positive children.”

A recent JAZAS study and a separate World Bank report describe south-eastern Europe (including Croatia, Romania and Bulgaria), as an area of relatively low incidence of AIDS. But the World Bank study says NGOs and governments should unite to “prevent an anticipated epidemic explosion” of HIV/AIDS.

Special attention should be paid to the fact that a growing number of young people, including newborn children, are being registered as HIV positive, he report adds.

According to official figures, Serbia has 1,500 registered HIV positive patients in a population of 7.5 million, 75 percent of them in capital Belgrade. Twenty of them are HIV positive children.

“However, one cannot say that these are the real figures,” says Dragana Stojanovic from JAZAS. “We are a highly conservative society with many more so-called hidden cases of HIV/AIDS. The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates ten unregistered cases for each registered patient in Serbia & Montenegro. So, the real number of infected can be put at 15,000, including at least 200 HIV positive children.” But that is still only a fraction of the high incidence in Romania.

Integrating those children into society can be difficult. “That is why we pulled some strings to transfer Stanko to another school in a distant neighbourhood, where no one knows how he lived until now.” Boras says.

“For the first four years, he had classes in the school library with a teacher for himself. He never played in the schoolyard and was thrown out from a course in English at a foreign languages institute once they learned of his condition. That is why people hide that they have HIV positive family members, even children.”

Leading Croatian commentator Viktor Ivancic says HIV positive children are being treated as having plague. “Croatia showed its ugliest face in the case of Ela and Nina,” he says.

Last year, the two sisters aged eight and six were prevented by locals from enrolling in a school in the small Adriatic town Kastel Novi. Their adoptive parents had moved from Kutina to the coast because they could no longer cope with prejudice and segregation of their girls, whose biological parents died of AIDS. Finally a separate teacher was found for the girls.

The World Bank study says there are only 341 reported cases of HIV/AIDS in Croatia, a country of some 4.2 million. Here too the number is believed to be at least ten times higher.

The study describes Croatia as a country where health promotion in relation to HIV/AIDS has been “very minimal” and where “stigma seems to dominate public opinion.” It says there are no NGOs with education campaigns on HIV/AIDS despite the alarming growth of drugs abuse and prostitution.

Bulgaria has had only 366 reported HIV positive cases since 1987, the World Bank report says. There are no separate statistics on HIV positive children, but the report warns that awareness levels about HIV/AIDS are low, and treatment opportunities limited.

Both JAZAS, the strongest NGO in the region, and the World Bank say that the situation with HIV infected children in Romania is serious. “More than 4,000 children are HIV positive, due to uncontrolled blood transfusions in the late 1980s,” Boras says. “Their fate will be the next problem.”

In the 1988-91 period, thousands of Romanian youngsters were infected by HIV. World Bank experts warn that Romania, a nation of 23 million, needs a strong programme to address this problem because the children will soon reach sexual maturity.

The Roma minority are a particular area of concern, the World Bank report says. There are 400,000 Romas registered in Romania, but their real number is believed to be around 1.5 million, the report says.

“Roma children are highly vulnerable to HIV infection, as many of them are working and living in the streets, where they are exposed to drugs and sexual abuse,” the report warns.

The number of cases in Albania and Macedonia is small, but that also means that there are few measures in place to check any spread of the infection.

HEALTH-BALKANS: When AIDS Catches Them Young

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic Reprint | | Print |

Vesna Peric Zimonjic

BELGRADE, Aug 7 2003 (IPS) - Stanko is a lively boy from Belgrade, due to start his fifth grade of elementary school on Sep. 1.
(more…)