our mission | our work | donate | our organization

MARY VEAL'S LIFE-SAVING WORK

Only two-thirds of the 50 children at Victor Babes Hospital in Bucharest get anti-retrovirals, according to Mary Veal, an American social worker. The hospital also serves another 450 outpatient children. Almost all have or have had TB; hepatitis is rampant. "Weâre always short of top-of-the-line medications to treat opportunistic infections," Veal says. Veal must supply even basic needs, from ibuprofen and vitamins to good food and warm clothes. Romania's raging inflation makes a bad situation that much worse.

Veal, who came to Bucharest from Georgia in 1993, runs a small nonprofit at the hospital, caring for children with HIV, many of them orphans. Other children, those who have parents, are able to remain at home and still receive healthcare because of the traveling nurses in Veal's program "Our hospital has the best care in the country," Veal says; but it's a world away from the standard in the west. Veal is "overwhelmed by the unfairness ... My kids here have as much right to live as a child in America or Britain. They deserve a future."

Most experts agree that prevention is the first line of defense, but more and more have come to realize that caring for people who already have AIDS is an essential part of any strategy to fight the disease.

ROMANIA & PEDIATRIC AIDS

More than 9,000 cases of childhood HIV have been reported in Romania; nearly three-quarters of Romanians with AIDS are under the age of 15. According to official United Nations statistics, more than 2,000 Romanian children have died of AIDS, but experts agree the number is much higher.

The epidemic's roots go back to the rule of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Ceausescu warehoused thousands of children, the products of a national ban on birth control and abortion, in orphanages under appalling conditions. Anemic or rundown kids were given blood transfusions as a sort of "pick-me-up," bad medicine made lethal because Romania did not then have facilities to screen its blood supply for HIV. Many more children were vaccinated with contaminated needles. By 1991, Romania had half the pediatric AIDS cases in Europe.

Fifteen years ago, riveted by horrifying TV images of "Romania's AIDS babies," the world sent help. Anti-retroviral combination therapies arrived in 1997 and death rates plummeted. But since then, international aid has been sporadic, and Romaniaâs healthcare system, gravely underfunded, lurches from one crisis to another.