When Teresa Njeri got pregnant in 2001 in Kiambu, a suburb of Nairobi, it was the end of the world. She was joyous about the pregnancy — but an AIDS test showed she was H.I.V.-positive. A clinician told her: “Make sure your husband comes in for testing — and don’t sleep with him.”
“I knew if you have AIDS you are going to die,” Njeri told me in an interview last week. But the clinic staff told her she had a chance to save her child. They gave her and the baby medicine that lowered the risk of H.I.V. transmission, and her son was born H.I.V.-free.
That was her only joy. Her husband
left her and she moved in with an aunt. When her son was 7 months old, Njeri developed full-blown AIDS and tuberculosis. She had not told her family she had H.I.V.; they learned when hospital staff told them to come care for her.
Njeri’s family started to keep away from her so she wouldn’t contaminate them. Her parents took her son back to the family’s village, assuming she would soon die. “The only friend I had was the preacher on TV, who gave me spiritual help,” she said.
Njeri’s experience was woefully typical for H.I.V.-positive women in Africa about 15 years ago. But today mothers and babies are more likely to be healthy. Since 2000, there has been a 58 percent drop in new infections of infants, Unaids, the United Nations AIDS-fighting agency, announced this week. In 2000, only 1 million people worldwide took the antiretrovirals that make having H.I.V. a chronic condition rather than a death sentence. Today, 15 million do. New infections are down by 35 percent and AIDS-related deaths down by 41 percent.
[For more of this story, written by Tina Rosenberg, go to http://opinionator.blogs.nytim...ype=opinion&_r=0]
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