People with HIV fight discrimination<\/p>\n
The Jakarta Post, Jakarta<\/p>\n
Last May, Devi, not her real name, was surprised when none of the
\nnurses congratulated her after she successfully delivered a baby
\ngirl.<\/p>\n
\"I was really hurt ... they turned the birth of my daughter
\ninto a sad moment,\" said the 25-year-old mother of two, who gave
\nbirth to her second child at a state hospital in Jakarta.<\/p>\n
She said it was her first real experience of discrimination
\nsince learning in March that she had contracted the Human
\nImmunodeficiency Virus (HIV) from her husband.<\/p>\n
\"The nurses were angry with me for giving birth at their
\nhospital and they said they did not want to help me,\" she
\nrecalled.<\/p>\n
\"In retrospect, I can understand their fears, however, it's
\nstill painful because the first people to discriminate against me
\nwere supposedly health professionals.\"<\/p>\n
The strong stigmatization associated with the virus has
\ncontributed to people being reluctant to report their status to
\nhealth authorities in this country, according to HIV\/AIDS
\nactivists.<\/p>\n
\"For example, the number of official recorded HIV\/AIDS cases
\nis only about 7,000, which is utter nonsense,\" said Zubairi
\nDjoerban, head of the Indonesian AIDS Society (MPAI) and
\nexecutive director of the University of Indonesia School of
\nMedicine AIDS working group.<\/p>\n
The cumulative number of HIV\/AIDS cases recorded by the
\nMinistry of Health between April 1987 and June 2005 stood at
\n7,098, which is far below the ministry's own estimate of up to
\n150,000 and further below some activists' estimates of nearly 1
\nmillion.<\/p>\n
The government has said none of the country's 33 provinces is
\nfree from the virus.<\/p>\n
Zubairi, who documented the first HIV infection in Indonesia
\nin 1986, said that despite the strong AIDS-awareness campaign in
\nrecent years, a lot of people still discriminate against those
\nliving with the virus.<\/p>\n
\"People are not evil. They are just ignorant because the
\ngovernment, AIDS activists, teachers, religious leaders and the
\nmedia have failed to educate the public,\" he said.<\/p>\n
Sri Wahyuningsih, founder of the Pelita Ilmu Foundation, which
\nfocuses on AIDS prevention and counseling, said that most people
\nrefused to live with HIV-infected people.<\/p>\n
\"Once people find out they have HIV, they are isolated ...
\nsometimes their houses are pelted with stones and quite often
\nthey are told to move to another island,\" she said. \"They are not
\nthe only ones affected, their whole family is also isolated by
\ntheir communities.\"<\/p>\n
Devi, who moved to another area of the country after finding
\nout she had been infected, said she had accepted the fact that
\nher husband transmitted the virus to her and that people would
\ndesert her.<\/p>\n
\"I don't blame anybody for anything,\" she said. \"Blaming
\npeople won't cure me ... all I can do is to try to spend the rest
\nof my life doing acts of goodness.\"<\/p>\n
She desperately hopes that her newborn baby, now six weeks
\nold, would be free of the virus.<\/p>\n
\"My worst fear is that people will think that I no longer
\nexist,\" she said. \"I can deal with it, however, I don't want to
\nsee my baby experiencing the same fate.\" (002)<\/p>",
"url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/people-with-hiv-fight-discrimination-1447893297",
"image": ""
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"sponsor": "Okusi Associates",
"sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com"
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