Strollerderby : AIDS

Mom Buys High School Musical Star's Condoms: Would You?

JeanneSager — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 17:16:00 GMT

If your first reaction to news that High School Musical star Zac Efron's mom buys his condoms is a grimace, don't worry. I don't like thinking of my three-year-old one day having sex either.

But Efron is twenty, and his mom wants him to be safe. Wouldn't you?

When photos of Efron and girlfriend Vanessa Hudgens surfaced, showing them at what appeared to be a sex shop, Efron says his mom confronted him. But she admitted she knew already that he was sexually active - and she showed it by stocking his Christmas stocking with an economy-sized box of condoms.

I don't know that I'd be quite that showy. A box slipped under the pillow or left on the bedroom desk, maybe. Shoved in the Christmas stocking? Er, reserve that for socks and underwear Ma!

But it's nice to see a mother who understands you need to set the squeamishness aside if you want to protect your kids. Remember - I'm not talking about a three-year-old, but if a teen is having sex, and you know it, ignoring it is not going to make it go away. Neither is screaming, yelling or riding them about it. Once it's happened, you have to get cracking.

The problem? A 2000 survey by the Kaiser Foundation showed thirty percent of sexually active teens are too embarrassed to actually condoms (although eighty-seven percent said they believed they were somewhat or very effective at preventing pregnancy, followed by eighty-four who believe they can protect against HIV/AIDS and seventy-two percent against STDs). That's nearly a third of all sexually active kids.

Would you really want to run the risk that your kid is one of the three in ten who won't buy them? Is it worth saving yourself the embarrassment to have to have someone call you Grandma?

So would you follow Mrs. Efron's lead? If you already knew your child was sexually active, would you buy them birth control?

Image: LA Times

Granting Son's Last Wish, Mom Opens Orphanage in Nairobi

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:35:00 GMT

When 15-year-old John Halgrim told a Make-a-Wish volunteer that his last wish was to open an orphanage in Africa, the volunteer was dumbfounded. Normally, the foundation grants requests such as meeting a celebrity or taking a trip to Hawaii. She wasn’t sure that Make-a-Wish could carry out such an ambitious, long-term request. “Do you have a second wish?” she asked John. The answer was no. “God didn't allow this to happen to me so I would get something out of it," John said, referring to his illness.

As Make-a-Wish struggled to figure out how to grant John's request, his mother arranged for him to meet with a local pastor and explain his desire to help destitute children in Africa. After he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, John had deepened his relationship with God. So he was thrilled when the pastor asked if he could videotape John discussing his vision for an orphanage that would serve children orphaned by AIDS.

After showing the videotape to a few congregations, the pastor had raised enough money for John’s mom to proceed with designing and constructing an orphanage in Nairobi. Two weeks before he died, John was shown an architect’s sketch of the John E. Halgrim Orphanage in Nairobi. And last month, one year after John’s death, his mother flew to Nairobi to welcome neighborhood children into the building.

Photo: Help the Least of These

HIV Positive Teen Sues School for Harassment

JeanneSager — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 21:57:00 GMT

When news started spreading around Westlane Middle School that a fourteen-year-old student had HIV, the harassment began. There were notes slapped on her locker warning her "No AIDS at Westlane." The coach of her soccer team joked that they could use her disease to their advantage - because the other team would be scared. The girl suffered daily name calling, teasing and constant bullying.

Now the girl's been pulled out of school by her parents, who are suing the Indiana institution for doing nothing to save their daughter from her tormentors. More than two decades after Ryan White, do kids still have to hide their HIV status?

There's a marked difference in the knowledge out there about HIV from the instant fear and massive homophobia of my eighties childhood. Ours was perhaps the first generation to be raised to have safe sex not to ward off unwanted pregnancy but to protect you from disease. We grew up in the time of Ryan White . . . and of Magic Johnson and Arthur Ashe. We were taught to be cautious - perhaps taught too much. I remember the health teachers giving us a blow by blow on what HIV and then AIDS could to do the body. Then they gave us the rundown of every single way we could possibly contract the virus. They terrified us - to the point where a bunch of overactive teenage imaginations were envisioning catching HIV by brushing up against someone walking down the street.

Too much of the information thrown at us to keep us safe was off base and overblown. Now the generation raised to shake in their boots at the thought of AIDS is charged with raising their own kids. What are they telling them? Because it sounds like the kids in Westlane Middle School are scared. It sounds like they don't understand that a teenage classmate with AIDS does not mean a death sentence for them. In this day and age it doesn't even mean a death sentence for her (thankfully).

Source: Salon

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Brad and Angelina Open Children's Clinic in Ethiopia

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 19:30:00 GMT

If only all fame and fortune were channeled into the common good....

Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have donated $2 million to start a center in Ethiopia for children with AIDS and tuberculosis. About 900,000 children in Ethiopia have been orphaned because of AIDS, and the country has the seventh highest rate of tuberculosis in the world. Though curable, tuberculosis continues to ravage the population in large part due to inadequate treatment.

The center will be named after Brad and Anelina’s adopted daughter, Zahara. “It is our hope that when Zahara is older, she will take responsibility for the clinic and continue its mission,” Pitt said.

This statement gave me pause. While raising one’s children to be activists and humanitarians is certainly laudable, Zahara is three years-old. This is sort of a hefty weight to place on her shoulders. If I heard a father of a three-year-old saying it was his hope that his daughter would grow up to be, say, a leading litigator at a big law firm, I would inwardly groan. On the other hand, I wish all rich parents encouraged their children to use their inheritance to be philanthropists.

What do you think? Is it okay to pigeonhole one's children into a certain line of work if that work is widely beneficial?

Photo: pursepage.com

Global Approach to AIDS Overlooks Children

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:04:00 GMT

A general consensus that has emerged from the International AIDS conference currently being held in Mexico is that the global approach to fighting AIDS does too little for children. According to health workers at the conference, much of the government money earmarked for combating AIDS in developing countries goes to consultants and overheard costs, with little of that money directly helping children.

Infected pregnant women need expanded access to antiretroviral drugs to avoid passing the HIV virus onto their babies. And even healthy children in AIDS-affected communities need much more nutritional and psychological help than they are currently getting—it’s estimated that only about 6 to 10 percent of children who need therapy are getting it, compared with 30 percent of adults.

One health worker suggested that one way aid money could more directly benefit children would be to give the money directly to communities and families. She pointed out that it has been shown that poor people make good decisions about how to obtain nutritional and medical help for their families if they are given the resources to do so.

Photo: Maciej Dakowicz/photo.net

Birds, Bees, and STDs

Brett Singer — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:33:00 GMT

I realize that this statement makes me a huge wimp, but I'm not looking forward to having "the sex talk" with either of my sons. And if Brian Hennessey and Radia Daoussi have their way, that talk is going to include AIDS.

Hennessey and Daoussi have made a film that follows their daughters around the 2006 International AIDS Conference in Toronto. The girls, ages 6 and 4, ask various health experts questions such as "How does AIDS get into your body?" This leads to discussions of condoms (one girl "thought the bright packages were candy") and also homosexuality ("A man can do it with a man if you like it.")

I have so many problems with this. First of all, why are the filmmakers bringing their young children to an AIDS conference in the first place? According to the Times, the focus of the documentary shifted to the girls during an "unplanned stop at the Condom Project's table," and that "a volunteer's struggle to turn her boilerplate spiel into words simpler than "destigmatize" made it clear that a child's innocence would elicit good interviews." So they used the kids as props to make their movie more interesting. Nice.

I'm not a prude, and I realize that children grow up faster than they used to. But in order to talk about AIDS, you first have to talk about sex. What age do you want to do that? Is a 4-year-old emotionally mature enough to process this information?

Then there's the notion that only the young are in need of being educated about this topic. When I was in high school, I had a part-time job at a health care center, working primarily in the lab. One day we got a phone call that a "Blue Dot" patient was coming down for a test. "Blue Dot" was the code the center gave to AIDS patients. I was the youngest worker there by about 15 years, but I was quickly told that I would be the one to sit out front and check him in. I was also told that I had to wear gloves (I didn't want to, since we never did that at the front desk, but I was told it was "too dangerous"), and that everyone else at the lab would be hiding in the back room. The man came downstairs, looking thin and rather sad. I looked at his form and started to write him into the lab record. Then my supervisor popped out, looked over my shoulder - never acknowledging the patient - and told me that this particular test could only be done in the morning. Then she scurried away, leaving me to explain the situation. In other words, if anyone had thought for a second to look at the test the doctor was ordering, the entire scene would have been avoided.

In other words, the person who was most aware of the lack of danger of being in the same room as an AIDS patient was also the youngest person there. Yes, this was in the 80's, and many people didn't understand anything about AIDS, just as many people didn't understand that wearing leg warmers in public was a bad idea. But it is absolutely true to say that there are still many people in the world of all ages who lack important knowledge about this disease. (The leg warmer problem has pretty much been solved, however.)

So what do the folks here think? How old were you when you first had "the talk" with your parents? What is the right age to hear about this stuff? Should we add "condoms and STDs" to "the birds and the bees"?

photo: eztakes.com

Breastfeeding Cuts Babies' HIV Risk

Karen Murphy — Fri, 30 Mar 2007 15:58:00 GMT

In a stunning new South African study, HIV-positive mothers who exclusively breastfed reduced the risk of postnatal HIV infection in their babies. The study revealed that infants of HIV-positive mothers who received formula milk in addition to breast milk were nearly twice as likely to be infected by HIV as infants who received breast milk only. In addition, the death rate of three-month old babies who were fed animal milk or solid foods was more than double that of babies who received breast milk only during that time.

The study concluded that current World Health Organization, UNICEF and UNAIDS infant-feeding guidelines need to be revised to include this information. Those current guidelines state, in part: "When replacement feeding is acceptable, feasible, affordable, sustainable and safe, avoidance of all breastfeeding by HIV-positive mothers is recommended...", and also state that: "To minimise HIV transmission risk, breastfeeding should be discontinued as soon as feasible..."

Whoa! So the findings of this study represent a complete turnaround from present practice. And maybe it'll start saving babies, and soon.

Study: Circumcision Reduces HIV Risk By 50%

Alisyn — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 16:24:00 GMT

The results of a new study conclude that male circumcision provides significant, immediate protection against HIV. Circumcised men in the study were 63 percent less likely than uncircumcised men to be infected through sex with HIV-positive women, whereas the AIDS vaccine has a target of 30% risk reduction, and may not be available for up to 20 years.

French AIDS researcher Bertran Auvert presented his study's findings yesterday at the International AIDS conference, which are based on 3,300 South African men, the largest study to date. He encouraged the promotion of circumcision, and adaptation of the public health system, as part of a health initiative in Africa.

The idea that circumcision helps prevent HIV is not a new one, but health officials have hesitated to make it part of their overall HIV prevention strategy, because of it's strong religious and social implications, and the risk of complications for those who choose circumcision, if the procedure is not performed correctly, or in unsanitary conditions.

With AIDS becoming increasingly widespread (there were an estimated 5 million new cases last year), and 2/3 of the world's men being uncircumcised, it remains to be seen whether or not circumcision will be a viable means of curtailing the world infection rate.

Would this new information encourage you to circumcise your son, as a means of future HIV protection, whereas before, you wouldn't have?