WOMEN: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT AIDS
Here are some likely questions and suggested answers, which should be adapted to your child’s age and needs.
What is AIDS?
It is an illness caused by infection with a virus (germ) called human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).
Why does AIDS kill people?
Everyone’s body has a natural means of fighting disease – the immune system. The HIV attacks this system, making it impossible to fight off other serious illness. AIDS patients usually die of infections such as pneumonia, or of cancer.
Why can’t AIDS be cured?
No medicine that can kill the AIDS virus has yet been discovered, and because it destroys the immune system, the body’s natural defences can’t overcome it.
How do you catch it?
This happens when blood, semen or other material containing the virus gets into another person’s blood. (Even with young children, don’t hedge about explaining that semen is the fluid that carries a man’s/ father’s sperm into a woman’s/mother’s body to fertilise an egg and start a pregnancy, and about how it gets in.) It can be passed on by blood transfusion, injection with a contaminated needle or syringe, or sex with an infected person. A baby can catch AIDS from an infected mother before or during birth, or from breast milk from an infected mother.
How you don’t catch it
Important. You must reassure your child that AIDS can’t be caught through ordinary domestic, school or social contact.
How can the spread of AIDS be stopped?
The best way to stop the epidemic is for everybody to keep the number of sexual partners to a minimum, practice safe sex in new relationships, and never share needles or syringes.
What does homosexual mean?
Some people of the same sex are attracted o each other and have sex together. They are called a homosexual couple. If one of the couple is infected, the HIV may be passed to the other, just as can happen when people of opposite sexes (a heterosexual couple) have sex together.
There are some circumstances in which talking to children about AIDS needs special care.
Children who need injections or are having surgery Make sure that your child knows that all needles and syringes used by nurses and doctors are sterile and can’t pass on AIDS. If surgery might involve transfusion, the child must be reassured that now all blood used in Australia is scrupulously tested to minimize the possibility of AIDS infection.
If someone in or close to the family is infected with HIV In such cases children must be repeatedly assured that HIV can’t be contracted by ordinary social contact, and fully informed about prevention of transmission.
The child who seems obsessively worried Try to find out what’s behind the fear. Perhaps the child has misinterpreted something seen or heard and has unreal fears about contagion. Maybe there has been sex play with other kids, about which the child feels guilty and scared of infection. If your child has been the victim of incest or sexual assault you may need the help of a specially trained counsellor (suggested by your doctor) to allay fears of AIDS.
Many schools have now introduced programmes to teach pupils about AIDS. So that information given to children may be reinforced at home, parents are invited to attend special meetings at their child’s school that feature films about AIDS and expert speakers to answer parents’ questions.
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