Growing Up: Young Adults Manage HIV/AIDS and Family Life in Romania

AmeriCares and Baylor-Romania work together to provide opportunity and hope for young adults living with HIV/AIDS as they manage the disease and start families of their own. Essential medicines, including anti-retrovirals, donated to Baylor-Romania’s Center of Excellence (COE) allow patients to care for their children without putting their health at risk. The HIV/AIDS clinical center, built to care for the overwhelmingly large number of children infected following an HIV/AIDS epidemic in the late 1980s, now also caters to young adults with HIV/AIDS as they transition to adult life.An impoverished family of four has experienced the benefits of the annual aid deliveries to COE.  The husband, age 27, and wife, age 24, were both diagnosed with HIV without knowing exactly how or when they contracted the virus; luckily, they became aware of their status early enough to avoid transmitting the infection to their toddler and newborn son. Through COE, both parents receive continuous support from AmeriCares, including treatments of anti-retroviral therapies, donated by AbbVie, and nutritional supplements, donated by Abbott.  When their young boys became sick with pneumonia and diarrhea, medicines provided by AmeriCares were used to treat the boys, allowing them to stay for extended periods of time with their parents in the hospital as all four family members received treatment and care.

Managing HIV/AIDS Rates in Romania

For over 20 years, AmeriCares has worked to reduce the high rates of HIV/AIDS that have impacted Romania, an impoverished country where treatments are expensive and difficult to access. In 2004, Baylor-Romania and AmeriCares decided to combine their expertise to treat patients at COE, a facility that has a state-of-the-art outpatient clinic, an inpatient observation unit, a laboratory, a pharmacy and specimen-processing area, classrooms and a short-term treatment and observation unit.“ AmeriCares has supported COE for over nine years, thanks in large part, to our partnerships with Abbott and now with AbbVie. As a large number of young adults with HIV/AIDS begin families of their own, we are helping them lead active lives and raise healthy families.” said Dmitriy Popov, AmeriCares senior program associate. AmeriCares supports COE with an assortment of much-needed medicines, including anti-infectives, cardiovascular medicines and analgesics, used to help patients combat opportunistic infections and other illnesses. In the past nine years, AmeriCares has delivered $38 million in medicines and medical supplies to support Baylor-Romania. The Center of Excellence has inspired a network of clinical centers in other regions of the world, some of which AmeriCares supports with the essential medicines and supplies they need to continue to treat patients impacted by HIV/AIDS.