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Eight toddlers found with HIV
The Tangerang regency health agency has found at least eight toddlers living with HIV over the past three years
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The Tangerang regency health agency has found at least eight toddlers living with HIV over the past three years.
"The eight toddlers are fine although their real condition is much different from others because they have weaker staminas on average than normal toddlers," Yuni Sunar Dewanti, head of communicable disease prevention at the agency told journalists Monday.
She said the toddlers lived at different places from 2006 to 2008.
Five of them were lived in Tangerang municipality, while three others lived in Tangerang regency. The eight are under the agency's supervision.
She said the toddlers had contracted HIV from their mothers, who had previously been declared HIV positive by the agency team.
"Some of the women were infected by their husband through needles and some were infected because they worked as prostitutes.
HIV detection rate in Tangerang reaches up 3 percent year each.
"We face difficulty in finding more people living with HIV because it's too private to enter and search for," she said.
In anticipation of a wider spread of HIV in the regency, the agency has set up a mother-to-child HIV transmission prevention program in cooperation with international organization Global Fund.
However, the regency council said the agency was slow in finding people with HIV.
Regency council deputy speaker Arif Wahyudi said he was pessimistic about the agency's capacity to discover the number of HIV cases in the regency.
"I fear the number of HIV cases will increase because it's difficult to find people living with HIV," he said.
However, the Banten's Commission for HIV Case Monitoring (KPAD) said 989 out of 1,413, or 70 percent people with HIV across the province, failed to get proper medical treatment due to lack of funds allocated from the provincial budget.
KPAD program officer Arif Mulyawan said the provincial administration allocated Rp 5 billion from the budget this year and the funds could only be used for provision of medical equipment and not medical treatment.
He said most of people living with HIV across the province were middle- to low-income earners.
"Due to lack of proper handling for HIV patients, we recorded at least 51 people living with HIV died over the past 10 years," he said,
"The 1,413 cases have been detected since 1998."
