HEALTH-MEXICO: Street Children at High Risk of AIDS

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Aug 18 2003 (IPS) - ”When you’re on drugs, you’re just out of it, and nothing matters. That’s how I got sick,” says Raúl, a young HIV-carrier who spent four years living on the streets of Mexico City.

”I had sex with another young guy to get drugs from him,” he confides to IPS.

The estimated 20,000 children and adolescents living on the streets of the Mexican capital know so little about HIV/AIDS that some believe they were infected just because they underwent an AIDS test, others swap free condoms for drugs, while some die of AIDS without ever knowing they had the disease.

Experts estimate that as many as seven percent of the youngsters living on the streets of Mexico City, most of whom are between the ages of 13 and 17, test positive for HIV, the AIDS virus, which is spreading fast among this high-risk group fuelled by ignorance, unprotected and often promiscuous sex, and high levels of drug abuse.

UNICEF, the United Nations children’s fund, says human rights are violated every time a child dies of AIDS.

The spread of HIV is ”a serious problem among street kids, because many of them are too involved in drugs to even care,” Silvia García, the director of Luna, a programme run by the Mexican chapter of Casa Alianza, commented to IPS.

Casa Alianza is the Latin America branch of the New York-based Covenant House, an international organisation that works with street children.

The most widely consumed drug among street children in Mexico is a solvent used to clean plumbing pipes. Less than two dollars buys 250 mms of the chemical, which the youngsters inhale by soaking a tissue in it. Sniffing the product causes hallucinations and temporarily alleviates sensations of hunger, sadness and loneliness.

The second-most widely consumed drug is the highly addictive crack cocaine, one dose of which costs between five and 10 dollars. The drug has found to be linked to criminal behaviour and promiscuity among street kids.

”Many street kids have HIV, but either aren’t aware of it or refuse to accept it,” says Raúl, who now receives free psychological and medical assistance from Luna.

And even though a local non-governmental organisation (NGO) ”hands out free condoms for us to have safe sex, the kids don’t use them, either out of embarrassment, because they don’t know how to use them, or because they prefer to swap them for drugs,” he adds.

The NGO that passes out condoms to street kids did not exist in 1994, when the first case of HIV/AIDS was registered among street children.

Thanks to the latest medical advances, Raúl can hope to live at least 10 more years. He says he is confident that a cure will be found for HIV/AIDS during that time.

None of the street kids interviewed for a study by Caracol, a Mexican NGO, in 1996 said they had used a condom that year, and many of the boys and young men said their girlfriends believed the intrauterine device (IUD) protected them from sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

The study, financed by the MacArthur Foundation in the United States, also found that sexual relations were infrequent among the members of the groups of street children, and that when they did exist, the sexual relationships were frequently monogamous.

It is now clear that street children mainly have sex outside of their groups, with people like taxi-drivers, bus drivers, police and shopkeepers in the areas where they live, the head of Caracol, Martín Pérez, told IPS.

”We must recognise that due to the lack of schooling and high levels of drug use among street children, as well as the frequent practice of exchanging sex for food, drugs or protection, they are a group at high risk of contracting the disease,” he added.

Since 1997, Caracol has been offering workshops on safe sex to street children in Mexico City as part of its campaign to prevent unwanted pregnancies and the spread of STDs like HIV/AIDS.

The Mexican chapter of Casa Alianza also provides education through its Luna programme. In addition, it takes in street children living with HIV/AIDS, who are provided with medical and psychological assistance.

The government also carries out awareness-raising prevention campaigns, and supplies people testing positive for HIV/AIDS with antiretroviral drugs free of charge, through NGOs and public hospitals.

”When a very sick boy, who we later found out had AIDS, came to us in 1995 there wasn’t much we could do. But now there is a medical network set up to help, and life expectancy is much greater for these patients,” Casa Alianza programmes director Alejandro Núñez said in an interview with IPS.

”There are kids in the streets who die of infections and diarrhoea, but without ever knowing that it was all caused by the AIDS virus, and that they could have gotten help,” he said.

Núñez and Pérez agreed that the impact of their AIDS prevention campaigns is limited by the high levels of drug abuse among street children, their ignorance about the disease, and the sexual contacts they have outside of their groups, whether by consent or as a result of sexual abuse.

They also both argued that the spread of the epidemic is fuelled by what they described as the ”paternalistic” practices of church groups and people acting out of charity, who bring the kids hot meals or clothing, take them to the barbershop, or even send clowns to entertain them.

That kind of ”band-aid” assistance does nothing to get the kids off the streets, ”because it resolves some of their needs, which means they have more time for drugs and unsafe sex,” said Pérez.

He pointed out that some NGOs offer the youngsters free AIDS tests, but that many of the street kids never even pick up the results. ”We have even found that some of the kids believe they already have the disease, just because they had an AIDS test,” Pérez added.

García said that in most of the cases of street children with HIV/AIDS who have shown up at Luna, ”the youngster was raped by a family member, or agreed to have sex with a local shopkeeper or driver.”

AIDS is the third cause of death among men aged 25 to 44 in Mexico, and 86 percent of the estimated 150,000 people living with HIV/AIDS in this Latin American country of 100 million are men, according to UNICEF.

Children under 15 account for 2.6 percent of the cases, while adults over 45 account for 17.6 percent.

”I don’t know how many Mexicans have this disease, but on the streets there are a lot of kids with HIV/AIDS, and I hope they do something to get help like I did, because otherwise they’re just going to die a horrible death,” said Raúl.