Children of A.I.D.S. are increasing in U.S.
NZPA-AP Boston He is three years old, wearing a red T-shirt and boasting how his Dad had taken him to see the fireworks. His little friend licks an ice block and shows off his purple tongue. “You can’t get me, Daddy,” shouts one of the boys as he races playfully down the hallway of the hospital wing. The illness that put them there is masked by their innocence and perfectly normal ways. They are the children of AI.D.S. Not all are so free to run and play. Some come into the world prematurely and drug-addicted. Many have swollen glands, sometimes enlarged livers and spleens. Their bodies are wracked by diarrhoea and nausea, burning with fever and wet from night sweats.
More than 500 of them across the United States have died of A.I.D.S. and 3000 are infected, according to Dr James Oleske, medical director of the children’s A.I.D.S. programme at Children’s Hospital in Newark, New Jersey.
Their numbers are growing at an alarming rate in a nation illequipped to care for them; in many places, hospitals must serve as expensive babysitters while foster homes are desperately sought for the infants.
Dr Martha Rogers, chief of pediatric and family studies for the A.I.D.S. programme at the federal Centres for Disease Control in Atlanta, estimates about 10,000 American children
under the age of 13 will be infected with the A.I.D.S. virus within a few years.
That is the low end of Dr Oleske’s estimate; he foresees 10,000 to 20,000 infected children by 1991.
“I estimate that one in every 10 to 15 hospital beds for children in the United States will be occupied by a child sick with the infection. That is a frightening statistic.” About 13 per cent of the child victims got A.I.D.S. through tainted blood transfusions.
Almost all the others, however, were doomed before birth, born to mothers infected with the A.I.D.S. virus through intravenous drug use. or through sex with a drug user. Six out of 10 of these children die by age two or three, Dr Oleske said. The tragedy is compounded when the mother is a single parent and unable to care for the infant because of her drug habit or because she is incapacitated with A.I.D.S. herself. A grandmother may care for both, watching ■ both daughter and grandchild deteriorate and die.
With family members unavailable to help in many cases, “Where are the increasing numbers of children born with A.I.D.S. going to be cared for?” Dr Oleske asked. “Who is going to care for them?”
One answer may lie in the establishment of statesupported transitional group homes that provide temporary care for outpatient children until foster homes can be found. Several have been set up in the last 18 months, and more are being planned.
At Boston City Hospital, a renovated wing known as Dowling 5 South can house four children. Among present residents are the two boys whose fathers cannot care for them full-time but who take them on outings like the Fourth of July fireworks.
Since the Dowling wing opened in February, 1987, the mothers of two children living there have died. .
“Give me two weeks,” pleaded one mother — and she held on long enough to make arrangements for the care of her child.
Anne Murphy, aged 31, a social worker at Dowling 5 South, has seen dying mothers “just coming in and spending time with their kids, playing with them, putting them to bed, feeding them supper: some of the daily routine kind of things that I think take on so much more meaning when you feel that your time could be limited.”
For many of the children, however, the warmth of mothers and fathers is absent, and nurses try to comfort them when they cry out with withdrawal pains.
Some of the older children, unable to understand what is happening to them, turn to their toy doctors’ kits and play out their own tragic lives. “They give us fake shots and take our blood pressure,” said Ms Murphy. “They play out a lot of the things that happened to them in the hospital... and kind of deal with the experience removed from it in a way.”
Many potential foster
parents are reluctant to consider children with A.I.D.S. — fearful or ignorant of the disease or unwilling to commit the extraordinary amount of time and energy required.
Even so, seven children from St Clare’s Home in Elizabeth, New Jersey, have been placed in foster homes, said Terry and Faye Zealand who founded the place of transition between hospital and foster care in May, 1987. They plan to open two more homes in New Jersey. In Elizabeth and Albany, townspeople have been sympathetic.
Local construction workers helped renovate a two-storey residence that had been vacant for two years for St Clare’s Home.
Civic organisations held fund-raisers and gave furniture to the Farano Centre for Children run by Albany Catholic Charities.
Hospitals may be the only home for many children of A.1.D.5., and that is costly for the states. Each A.I.D.S. child’s hospital stay costs an average SUS6SO ($1020) a day because of the extra nursing care and therapy required. This compares, for example, with SUS24O ($376) a day at St Clare’s.
Some of these children have never played with a dog or felt the sunshine. “Everything is a sense of wonder or awe for these children,” said Sister Maureen Joyce, who runs one centre. “I was planting some flowers and brought kids out with me. They sat and felt the grass. I had them help me plant flowers. They were so excited.”
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Press, 12 September 1988, Page 9
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935Children of A.I.D.S. are increasing in U.S. Press, 12 September 1988, Page 9
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