Decreasing HIV

The article I’m blogging about I found here on allafrica.com. It is entitled Rwanda: HIV Mother-to-Child Transmission Down Eight Percent. The story comes out of Kigali. It tells us that since 2004, mother to child transmission of the HIV/AIDS disease has come down to only 2.7 percent from 11 percent in Rwanda. There are now 384 health centers in the country that provide help to pregnant women to help them from passing the disease to their babies. When they start using drugs from 28 weeks to 14 weeks the drugs successfully fight the virus and stop it from being passed into the unborn babies. Although the percentages have come way down, there are still about 23,000 babies born to HIV positive mothers every year and 7,000 of them need ARV therapy but another positive is that 72 percent of the children with HIV are getting ART therapy, which has increased 10% in the last 5 years. Although Rwanda has come very far, they still want to call upon everyone to help them further fight HIV and AIDS in their country until children are no longer being born with the disease.

I chose this article because one of questions answered in this weeks discussion posts had to do with HIV/AIDS and I thought it would be a good topic for a blog. My first thoughts after reading this article was that other countries need to take note from Rwanda. They are doing an AWESOME job in helping to fight against HIV and AIDS. No child should have to be born thinking/knowing that they could die at any time of this horrible disease and it's not even their fault and it might not really be their mothers' fault either, she could have been infected without knowing or against her will. Africa has such high numbers of occurrences and deaths from HIV and AIDS; it comes second only to Malaria. I think Rwanda is doing everything right in this case because they are providing health care facilities for pregnant women all over the country; 384 of them! The only problem now is women being able to get to them, which I know can be a problem in countries that have few roads and few people with vehicles but providing nearly 400 who give them drugs to help protect their unborn babies is an awesome start to decreasing that number from 2.7 percent to zero. I know zero is probably not realistic but maybe in the case of transferring mother to child it's more realistic than other cases. Every child should have the opportunity to be born healthy, they shouldn't be punished because their mothers may or may not have done something wrong. Go Rwanda!

Rwanda is not only giving healthcare facilities for people infected but there are also some schools in Rwanda with AIDS Clubs which are designed to educate the students about the disease and how to prevent it. Here is a quick 2 minute YouTube video about one place in particular.