Assistance to HIV-positive children is more than a medical issue

Only a few years ago, HIV-positive children without parental care had almost no chances to be brought up in a family environment. Nowadays, the situation has changed, and the number of HIV-positive children being adopted in Russia has been growing increasingly.  

“A real miracle has happened this year,” said Dmitry Voronin, MD, Head of the Applied Research Centre for the Prevention and Treatment of HIV Infection in Pregnant Women and Children, speaking at a press-conference in Moscow. “Five children from my centre have been placed in substitute families, and we are now processing documents to facilitate alternative family placement for another three children. For comparison, over the last nine years, we managed to place only two HIV-positive children in family-based care.”  Yevgeny Voronin noted that the situation had been changing thanks to the efforts of both state-run and non-governmental organizations and singled out a significant role of the public information campaign conducted within the framework of the Year of the Family. 

“Today, HIV/AIDS-affected families are in need of specialized assistance, both social and psychological,” Bertrand Bainvel, UNICEF Representative for the Russian Federation, said. “It is important that these families do not feel abandoned, that they have everything they need to bring up their child properly”.   

Today, there are about 5,000 children in Russia, whose HIV-positive status has been confirmed.  Thanks to the progress of contemporary medicine, HIV-positive children can live a regular and adequate life, with the state providing them with all the required medication. However, both children brought up in families and those without parental care face a much more serious problem – communication gap, fear and stigma.

In 2008, UNICEF conducted a survey examining the quality of healthcare and social services provided to HIV-positive mothers and their children. A lot of women referred to the problem of having their children enrolled in a kindergarten or a school. “It’s not because my child is sick that I don’t want to enroll him in a kindergarten, but because I fear someone may learn about his diagnosis and carry the news to everyone in the neighborhood,” one of the survey respondents said. 

In the coming years, a lot of HIV-positive children should start going to school. “Foreseeing potential problems at educational institutions, we have embarked upon a training programme targeted at caregivers and teachers to get them prepared for admission of HIV-positive children to their kindergartens and schools,” Tigran Yepoyan, UNICEF HIV/AIDS project coordinator.  In 2007-2008, UNICEF developed and tested an integrated training programme for educational workers on issues related to education of HIV-affected children. Training and methodological materials entitled “Positive children” were developed for school teachers and social workers. Some 2,800 caregivers at pre-school facilities and children’s homes and primary school teachers from more than 1,350 educational facilities underwent appropriate training in the Orenburg and Irkutsk regions and the Altai territory.

http://www.unicef.org/russia/media_10434.html