By Busani Bafana
BULAWAYO, Apr 3 2014 (IPS) - Three years ago, Robert Ngwenya and his father got into a heated argument over medication. Ngwenya, then aged 15, refused to continue swallowing the nausea-provoking pills he had been taking since he was 12 years old, and flushed them down the toilet.
During the argument, Ngwenya understood he had been born HIV positive, had been taking antiretrovirals (ARV) and not vitamins and anti-allergenics, and that his father too lived with the virus and the guilt of having infected him.
“This is unfair, what did I do to deserve this?” Ngwenya laments.
Ngwenya lives in the high density suburb of Pumula in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, with his father, a car mechanic, and his younger brother, who is HIV negative. His mother died when Nwengya was 10 and his father never remarried.
Ngwenya’s life was all planned: finish high school, get a degree in information technology, find a job and buy a car. Not any more. After the revelation, he is no longer the same outgoing teenager whose company brought smiles to friends and family.
“How do I tell my friends? How do I start a relationship knowing someone will have to carry my burden?” he asks.
Like Ngwenya’s father, other HIV positive parents, weighed down by guilt, find it hard to tell their children they were infected at birth.
How and who tells a child or teenager that they will live with the virus for the rest of their lives?
Hard choices
Thanks to ARV therapy, increasing numbers of HIV infected children are living to adolescence. In 2012, Zimbabwe had 180,000 children aged 0-15 and 1.2 million people aged 15 and above living with HIV, says the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
“As these children grow and surpass the immediate threat of death, the issue of informing them of their HIV status arises,” says a study on teenagers born with the virus in Zimbabwe.
Disclosing to adolescents is different from telling younger children and requires tailored, age-appropriate guidelines, says the study.
Adolescents aged 16-20 interviewed for the study preferred to be told by health care workers at clinics, with the presence of family.
“Disclosure to this age group in a healthcare setting may help overcome some of the barriers associated with caregivers disclosing in the home environment and make the HIV status seem more credible to an adolescent,” reports the study.
Source: Inter-Press Service (IPS).
Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/04/zimbabwe-positive-children-negative-news/.
BULAWAYO, Apr 3 2014 (IPS) - Three years ago, Robert Ngwenya and his father got into a heated argument over medication. Ngwenya, then aged 15, refused to continue swallowing the nausea-provoking pills he had been taking since he was 12 years old, and flushed them down the toilet.
During the argument, Ngwenya understood he had been born HIV positive, had been taking antiretrovirals (ARV) and not vitamins and anti-allergenics, and that his father too lived with the virus and the guilt of having infected him.
“This is unfair, what did I do to deserve this?” Ngwenya laments.
Ngwenya lives in the high density suburb of Pumula in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second city, with his father, a car mechanic, and his younger brother, who is HIV negative. His mother died when Nwengya was 10 and his father never remarried.
Ngwenya’s life was all planned: finish high school, get a degree in information technology, find a job and buy a car. Not any more. After the revelation, he is no longer the same outgoing teenager whose company brought smiles to friends and family.
“How do I tell my friends? How do I start a relationship knowing someone will have to carry my burden?” he asks.
Like Ngwenya’s father, other HIV positive parents, weighed down by guilt, find it hard to tell their children they were infected at birth.
How and who tells a child or teenager that they will live with the virus for the rest of their lives?
Hard choices
Thanks to ARV therapy, increasing numbers of HIV infected children are living to adolescence. In 2012, Zimbabwe had 180,000 children aged 0-15 and 1.2 million people aged 15 and above living with HIV, says the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS).
“As these children grow and surpass the immediate threat of death, the issue of informing them of their HIV status arises,” says a study on teenagers born with the virus in Zimbabwe.
Disclosing to adolescents is different from telling younger children and requires tailored, age-appropriate guidelines, says the study.
Adolescents aged 16-20 interviewed for the study preferred to be told by health care workers at clinics, with the presence of family.
“Disclosure to this age group in a healthcare setting may help overcome some of the barriers associated with caregivers disclosing in the home environment and make the HIV status seem more credible to an adolescent,” reports the study.
Source: Inter-Press Service (IPS).
Link: http://www.ipsnews.net/2014/04/zimbabwe-positive-children-negative-news/.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.