Saturday, July 28, 2012

Rights groups and HIV/AIDS workers say conservative

Rights groups and HIV/AIDS workers say conservative India's fight against the disease is being undermined by ignorance and prejudice.

Sufferers are often denied treatment by hospitals, thrown out by families, evicted by landlords or fired.

Children remain the hidden face of this suffering. When a parent is infected, children drop out of school to care for them, or go to work to replace the lost income, until they become orphans, health workers say.

Prejudice is so deep-rooted that a southern state, Kerala, failed to persuade schools to take in two infected children and was forced to bear the cost of their education at home.

Children do not figure on India's estimate of 2.5 million people infected with HIV, but the Government says about 50,000 children below 15 years of age are infected by the virus every year.

Among the students in Bhoogaon is Ramesh. His caregiver says Ramesh's father infected his mother because he wanted her to suffer his deadly fate.

All the students are aware of the fatal nature of their ailment. Seven children have died at the school in the past few years.

All of the school's 53 pupils are HIV-positive, but none has AIDS yet and they are receiving expensive anti-retroviral treatment.

"When one of us falls sick and is taken to hospital we keep wondering if he or she is going to come back," says Ramesh.

Some of them remember cremating their parents and then being subjected to torture by their relatives and finally fleeing home.

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