Jake Glaser: No Childhoods Lost to HIV


As immature people who were innate and grew adult with HIV, we faced an implausible challenge. Every day presented new obstacles for us and a families. Some days were some-more formidable than others, and other days — days spent ill from drugs or too fearful to tell a friends a certain standing — seemed scarcely impossible.

But we were also impossibly lucky. We were innate in a United States to families who could entrance a medical imagination that saved a lives. But what if we weren’t? What if we didn’t accept some of a best medical caring in a world? What if we didn’t have family and support systems to quarrel for us, creation certain we took a dozens of pills daily that kept us alive, holding us to appointment after appointment, even when a parents’ possess health was failing? We could have simply turn a statistic.

Even with a believe and medicines to forestall delivery of HIV from mothers to children, there are still babies being innate with HIV here and around a world. Thousands of children in a U.S. and millions worldwide are vital with HIV. With a right treatment, they will tarry and flower usually like us. They’ll have initial days of school, parties, graduations, and children of their own. Without early treatment, half of those children will die by their second birthday. Their journeys will finish distant too soon.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Over a past dual decades, there have been extraordinary advancements in HIV/AIDS research. When AIDS was initial identified in 1981, it was a genocide sentence, that is what a relatives were told. But since of a efforts of so many we now have a treatments indispensable to keep families healthy.

One of a biggest medical developments was finding how to forestall HIV from being upheld from mom to child — an choice that wasn’t accessible for a moms. Scientists, governments, drug manufacturers, and private donors have come together to emanate and furnish HIV drugs for children and adults that are easier to take and can be taken reduction frequently. They are also operative toward an contingent cure. But until then, one of a biggest hurdles is usually removing a medicines we already have to a millions of people who desperately need them.

In many countries, usually removing tested for HIV is a month-long ordeal, one that can take distant too prolonged for babies vital with HIV who need evident diagnosis to survive. And when it comes to creation certain that HIV-positive children get a drugs they need to stay healthy, usually 28 percent of them have entrance to these drugs. But it doesn’t have to be that way.

We are holding a mount — for ourselves and for a children usually like us around a world.

Every child deserves an event to grow up, to have a fifth birthday, to have a initial kiss, to follow their dreams — and if they want, to have a family of their possess someday. Every primogenitor deserves to watch their child live a healthy, happy life — and to assistance them build their possess splendid futures.

Join us as we quarrel for all children and families influenced by HIV. Let’s keep fighting until an AIDS-free era becomes a reality.

Jake Glaser, Janice McCall, and Cristina Peña engaged HIV by mother-to-child delivery of a virus. Today, since of a lifesaving medicine they received, they are healthy immature adults. As Ambassadors for a Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, they teach and disciple on interest of all children and families putrescent and influenced by HIV/AIDS. To learn some-more about their stories, revisit www.pedaids.org.


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