Ten-year-old Sharmila A was HIV-positive and had lost both her parents to AIDS. She stopped going to school in the fourth grade. “When I went to school, I sat separately…on the last mat,” the report quotes Sharmila as saying. “The other children wanted to be with me, but the teacher would tell them not to play with me.”
Infected with tuberculosis and denied anti-retroviral drugs at a government hospital, Sharmila died in January 2004.
Among young children, transmission at birth is the most common source of the infection. However, children in India are also acquiring HIV through sexual contact, including sexual abuse, blood transfusions and unsterilised syringes sometimes used to inject narcotic drugs.
Most of those dying of AIDS are between 15 and 49 years old, the age when many are raising children. The number of AIDS orphans has not been adequately measured, but some calculate more than a million children under the age of 15 in India have lost one or both parents to AIDS.
“Although India’s HIV/AIDS policy has sorely neglected children, some government officials have started to speak out about the need to reach children who are seen to be ‘innocent victims’,” the report says.
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