Children living with HIV should know their status, says Researcher
A medical researcher, Dr. Dan Onwujekwe said, parents should let children with HIV know their status, failure to disclose to children who are HIV positive their true status will make such children rebellious.
Onwujekwe, a retired Chief Research Fellow at the Nigerian Institute of Medical Research, Yaba Lagos, said in an interview that such a disclosure is a very sensitive one, parents should choose the right time to disclose it to them.
However, it must be handled professionally with counsellors and pediatricians so that they will manage the information very well. Parents who have children living with HIV need to be close to them and assist them in managing the fallout of the situation.
“Parents should monitor their children living with HIV and know when to disclose their status to them. Otherwise, when the children become adolescents, they will become rebellious because they are given medicine every day. They will start asking questions.
“Many of them will not take the drug. Also, some of them when they get to secondary school or boarding school, taking their drugs every day becomes a challenge because they are living in a hostel with other people and they will ask questions,” He explained.
According to him, concealment of the HIV status of a child is not an option at all, lamenting that Nigeria has a lot of children living with HIV.
“When these children become rebellious, they will discontinue treatment and treatment failure will happen. When treatment failure happens, this will put their lives at risk. This shouldn’t happen.
“Children living with HIV do well if they are guided and if they are told early, supported and shown love. If they know that they can confide in you, they do very well. I know many of them and they do better than children who are negative if they are managed well,” he said.
According to a 2019 report by the United Nations Children’s Fund, over 15 per cent of AIDS-related deaths in children and adolescents globally occur in Nigeria.
Experts said HIV can be transmitted from an HIV-positive woman to her child during pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding.
Mother-to-child transmission of HIV according to experts, accounts for the vast majority of infections in children (0-14 years) in Nigeria.
“We have a very high number of pediatric HIV, that is, children born with HIV. This shows that their mothers were not tested in pregnancy.
“That means they were not accessing antenatal care because if they were accessing antenatal care, the mothers would have been discovered and they would have been placed on treatment.
“It is also compulsory to test all pregnant women for HIV who show up in an antenatal clinic.
“if we can provide antenatal care to every pregnant woman and during the antenatal care we offer them HIV testing, we would be able to detect those who are HIV positive and put them on treatment.”
The researcher decried the lack of personnel adequately trained to deliver HIV services.
He called for the training of traditional birth attendants in HIV management, adding that pregnant women patronising them should have access to HIV testing to further prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.
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