2005 New Cases: 1,806*

Black: 63%
White: 28%
Latino: 7%

Children
College Students
Women

Adolfo Aguilar
Outreach Worker, Chatham Social Health Council
Coleen Cunningham
Chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases, Duke University Medical Center
Milford Evans
Benefits Advocate
Gerrod Henderson
HIV Positive teenager
Peter Leone, M.D
Medical Director, HIV/STD Prevention & Care Branch
Jonathan Perry
HIV Positive
Fred Wiggins
HIV Positive
Del Williams, Ph.D
Manager, Epidemiology & Special Studies HIV/STD Prevention & Care Branch

HIV/AIDS on Campus
HIV/AIDS & Kids
HIV/AIDS & Latinos
HIV/AIDS & Women

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*NC Department of Health and Human Services

HIV in Children

In many ways, Gerrod Henderson is a typical teenager. He enjoys playing the piano, watching television, and hanging out with his friends. But one thing is very different: He is HIV Positive, having contracted the virus at birth from his mother.

"I found out when I was 5 or 6, one of those, and it was through eavesdropping which little kids like to do," says Henderson. "My mother and my doctor were talking and they had mentioned it, and I was just like oh, I have HIV; okay let me go play in the toy center, and it was just something in the back of my head."

When Gerrod Henderson was born in the late 1980s, there was no way to prevent HIV transmission from mother to child.

"If a mother was HIV positive, there was a one in four chance that her baby would be infected," says Dr. Susan Fiscus, who runs the state lab at UNC-Chapel Hill that tests babies born to HIV-positive mothers. After promising research in the mid-1990s, doctors began treating pregnant, HIV-positive women with AIDS drugs, and Dr. Fiscus watched the statewide transmission rate plummet.

"It went from 25% in 1993 down to about 10 to 15% for the next two years, then went down to about 5% for several years, then about 3% and last year 2.4%," she says. "We have about three to five kids every year who are infected."

Doctors say the first step in preventing mother to child transmission is HIV testing. North Carolina law requires pregnant women to have an HIV test unless they specifically choose not to. A state survey found in 2003, 83% of women were tested during pregnancy or delivery.

"It's just important for every woman who's pregnant to know what her HIV status is because there's something that could be done to protect her child if it was positive," says Dr. Coleen Cunningham , Chief of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at Duke University Medical Center.

Protecting the child often means putting the mother on medication, says Dr. Cunningham. Then, once the babies are born, they take medicine for six weeks. If the virus was transmitted during birth, the medicine might prevent infection. Then Dr. Susan Fiscus' lab tests the babies' blood for HIV. Dr. Fiscus says nowadays, most transmissions happen because mothers either didn't know they had HIV or received no prenatal care.

"I had to call one of the pediatricians to tell them this baby was infected, so they called back some time later after talking to the mother," Dr. Fiscus says. "And she said she would have been tested if only her obstetrician would have asked her or mentioned it to her. It's hard enough when everything has gone, everyone has done it according to plan and there's a transmission. That's bad. But it makes me kind of angry as well when I know that a lot of these could have been prevented. Not all of them. But a lot of them could have been prevented."

Children who have HIV face a special set of circumstances, according to Dr. Cunningham.

"What I frequently see is families are so terrified of the reaction they're going to get from the people around them, whether it's the church or the school or the friends or the neighbors, that they do keep it a big secret," says Dr. Cunningham. "The stress of keeping that secret is actually very hard on the kids and their families. It also sends a message to the child that there's something we're ashamed of and there's something that if people knew it about you they would be horrified."

Gerrod Henderson says he picks and chooses whom to tell.

"Me and my uncle, when I was younger, used to have debates about you can't tell these people," he remembers. "You can't do this. And I used to always say why, because it's not really a big deal to me."

He sees his illness as an opportunity to educate.

"I feel I'm helping the world, helping mold people's minds into what it is. It's not all about you being sick, cause I ain't sick. I don't look sick."

To stay that way, Gerrod eats a balanced diet, exercises, and takes several medicines each day.

"I take 5 medicines at night and 4 in the morning," he says.

He says the biggest problem he deals with is a lack of social support for HIV positive teenagers, so he hopes to start a club at school for students coping with diseases. He's also looking toward the future. Gerrod plans to go to college. He's thinking about being a lawyer, a social worker, or a pediatrician. And he's not thinking about HIV.