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Urgent treatment required for Klaten infants infected with HIV
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Save the children – Activists stage a rally to call for greater efforts to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS. Nineteen children under 5 years old have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Klaten, Central Java. (Tempo/Aditia Noviansyah)
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ineteen children under the age of 5 years old have been diagnosed with HIV/AIDS in Klaten, Central Java, and now require urgent treatment.
In the last case, detected in January, a 2-year-old boy was reported to have shown symptoms of HIV since he was 18 months old.
“The only possible way a child under 5 can be transmitted the virus is if the mother is HIV-positive during pregnancy and childbirth. Unfortunately, it often happens that antibody screening tests conducted on parents are unable to detect HIV infection,” said Amin Bagus Panuntun, an activist from the National AIDS Commission (KPA) Klaten, on Tuesday.
Based on KPA Klaten data, during the period of 2007-2015, 18 children under 5 were indicated to have the HIV virus in their blood. Of them, seven children tested positive for HIV in the middle of 2015.
Amin said mother-to-child transmission of HIV could be prevented if it was ascertained early on whether the parents had contracted HIV/AIDS. The problem, he said, was the widespread reluctance to undergo voluntary counseling and testing (VCT) for various reasons. As a result, many babies were infected with HIV because their mothers were unaware that they themselves had contracted the virus.
“Therefore, starting this year, we will direct all pregnant women in Klaten to take VCT to prevent the transmission of the virus from HIV-infected mothers to children,” said Amin.
Meanwhile, he went on, all babies who had tested positive for HIV/AIDS would get treatment from the Klaten Health Agency via hospitals it had appointed to provide antiretroviral (ARV) therapy to slow down the copying of the virus in the body.
“Currently, we handle all HIV/AIDS-infected babies. They will receive a continuous supply of ARV drugs,” Klaten Health Agency head Cahyono Widodo said on Tuesday.
Over the course of the last nine years, the number of HIV/AIDS cases in Klaten has continued to increase from year to year. Based on KPA Klaten data, 105 people were found to have contracted HIV/AIDS in 2015. They could not, however, be said to be new patients; they were merely recorded as patients last year when they started VCT.
In total, the number of HIV/AIDS-infected people in Klaten reached 380 between 2007 to January this year. Of the total, 273 patients are heterosexuals, followed by high-risk people (47), men who have sex with men (26), children under 5 (19), injecting drug users (9), transsexuals (3) and bisexuals (3). (ebf)
