Children and AIDS

Issues of health and health care, both on individual and global levels, are exceptionally important for our contemporary society. At that, for decades AIDS remains among the most terrible and devastating diseases of our times, which caused numerous deaths all around the world. Nowadays, AIDS is one of the most dangerous threats to global health and welfare. That is why the problem of prevention of further spread of this epidemic is extremely topical, especially in the regions of Sub Saharan Africa, Caribbean and Asia, where the amount of infected people exceeds 8% of the population, and the number of deaths runs into millions.

Of course, AIDS affects children. According to the report of UNIADS, in 2007 about 2 million children had AIDS, but this data may not reflect the real situation due to substantial lack of HIV monitoring devices in African regions, where 80% of AIDS affected people live. This epidemic endangers health and well-being of thousands of children, especially in developing countries. Needless to say, how important it is to unite the efforts and help those young AIDS carriers, whose lives are in constant danger.

Treatment and taking care about such children require a lot of tolerance, courage and efforts, from the side of both medical specialists and parents. Children affected by AIDS have to be provided with everything necessary to feel themselves equal with their peers and grow up as usual members of our society, in all possible meanings. The main medical treatment of children affected by AIDS is prevention of getting “opportunistic infections”. Due to extending variety of medications for such infections, the amount of children’s deaths caused by these diseases (first of all, pneumonia) is recently drastically decreasing.