HIV/AIDS week two!

Hello everyone,



Hope you all are doing well this week. This week I am halfway through this book I am reading for this class. It is called At Risk by Alice Hoffman. It is about a twelve year old girl named Amanda who has AIDS due to a contaminated blood transfusion, because they were not screened. Right now in the book Amanda was just diagnosed with AIDS and the family is taking it really hard. Amanda's father Ivan is blaming her doctor and is extremely angry and aggressive. Polly, Amanda's mother is now doing everything she can possibly do to make Amanda happy and is constantly doing everything thing with the thought that Amanda does not have enough time left in the back of her head. And Charlie, Amanda's brother is mad at Amanda for ruining his life, due to the controversies AIDS is now causing at his school and between his friendship. Multiple students' parents are pulling there kids out of school in fear of their children catching AIDS and the students staying at the school and scared to use the bathroom or sit by Charlie and Amanda in fear of AIDS too. Parts of the neighbor hood are staying away, and other parts trying to help. Now, this book sets place between the 70s and 80s, and the main reason Amanda's AIDS is causing such a hysteria is due to the fact of uneducation, and unfortunately some are not educated about AIDS at all now too. This story is really eye opening to me about how tough HIV/AIDS is on a child, and it also disturbs me on how some parents in the neighborhood are acting like Amanda chose to have this disease and if she coughs on them they will catch it. This really does help show that education is one of the main factors in the prevention of the spreading of HIV/AIDS.



Also this week my class was instructed to research a HIV/AIDS organization based outside the US. My choice is the Aids foundation of South Africa (AFSA) and is the first non-government organization in South Africa. According to the AFSA website, their main focus is to improve the health to target sites by providing mentoring and support through donor's help. The AFSA also does research and reports the statistics they find.
www.aids.org/za



Did you Know:



This week I decided to talk about different HIV preventive therapies from mother to child including, HAART (Highly Active Antiretrovial Therapy), Nevirapine, and Zidovudine. HAART is used to prevent the transmission of HIV from mother to child while postnatal. According to the Science Daily HAART effectively reduces the transmission of HIV while breastfeeding up to 82%, and most of the 12% that was ineffective was, because the mothers either did not take the medicine regularly or had a too high CD4T count. Nevirapine and Zidovudine are given at the beginning of labor and up to two weeks after birth and are effective in preventing transmission up to 67%. All three of these drugs work by turning off an enzyme in HIV that prevents HIV from attaching to CD4T cells and eventually the HIV dies. It is amazing that we have such high percentages in preventing transmission from mother to child now and is sign of great things to come.