It was not long ago when the Church had the mentality that HIV/AIDS is a “gay disease” and that those infected should be shamed and isolated. Times have changed and now the Church and other Christian organizations have moved to the forefront in caring for victims and spearheading campaigns to remove the stigma associated with people living with the disease.
Dr. Scott Todd, a pediatric AIDS expert and director of the AIDS Initiative of Compassion International, is one such Christian leader working to care for victims of HIV/AIDS.
In a recent interview, Dr. Todd shared about Compassion’s efforts to care and raise awareness on the plight of millions of vulnerable children, mostly in Africa, whose lives have been ravaged by the epidemic.
CP: We don’t hear that much about the effects of HIV/AIDS on children. How have these young lives been affected by the disease?
Todd: AIDS is a disease that is a massive enemy in our mission to secure the physical well-being of children. But not only their physical well-being, but their social and emotional well-being as well because AIDS is not just a medical concern but it also has extraordinary effects on a person’s sense of self-worth and value, and their relationship with others – the stigma, discrimination and isolation. All this leads to a great amount of pain and hurt.
So it is hitting us in all of those areas that we are trying to provide growth and opportunity to kids.
Do you know that half of the new infections are happening this year in children and youth? So when people talk about those prevention strategies it’s such a staggering gap to not talk about children.
To give you some of the numbers on that, everyday over 1,000 babies are going to be born with HIV/AIDS already flowing in their blood, and that is an infection in those babies that is largely preventable. We see very few cases of that in the United States because we have the treatment and we do the intervention.
In most of the world - in fact 90 percent of those kids are Africans – the mother doesn’t even know her status. She doesn’t know that she’s HIV-positive. That is the first arm of our fight – prevention. We know there is no cure. There are drugs – anti-retrovirals that can be effective in treatment. But without a cure we like to say prevention is the only cure.
That means you have to develop your strategy around kids. How do you prevent them from being infected. I mentioned one – prevention of mother-to-child transmission – and the other is giving young men and women a solid basis of knowledge, motivation, and commitment to abstinence and purity. We know that is not the only cause, that there are many cases of coercion and many girls are suffering through those relationships and rape. We need to find strategy to protect them, to secure them to give them a place of strength and stability.
Our main mandate is to raise a generation that is HIV free. And that is a possible thing to do. We aren’t just talking about some pipedream here. We are talking about something that can be done and that is what we are committed to doing – preventing HIV in newborns and in youths.
CP: Could you explain how so many of these children are infected with HIV?
Todd: The mother is HIV-positive and when they give birth there is a 40 percent chance that the virus will transfer to the baby. Much of that is during pregnancy and at labor when the baby is being delivered the placenta barrier is broken and the mixing of the mother’s blood with the baby’s fluid exposes them to the virus.
Some of it also happens through breast-feeding. Those are the ways that the virus moves from the mother to the baby. And if you give that mother a small dose of the anti retro-viral drug, you can shut down the HIV in the mother enough so it won’t jump to the baby.
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