Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 1995. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia, Inc. - 01 Dec 95
Peter Bale / Reuter

Many are still here, innocent victims of a unique AIDS crisis where by far the greatest number of cases are children, infected because of poor health care.

Six years since the end of communism, AIDS and HIV-positive babies are still the lowest of the low in Romania. Most are shunned and sent to hospitals and orphanages.

Of 2,291 Romanian AIDS sufferers alive as of Sept. 30 this year, 91 percent were children -- more than half the paediatric AIDS cases for the whole of Europe.

But in many cases their conditions have improved from the harrowing scenes immediately after the revolution. Usually with the help of foreign charities, many of the worst hospital wards and filthy orphanages have been cleaned and care improved.

Yet the statistics and the reality remain depressing.

Romania has 100,000 children, most abandoned rather than real orphans, in state-run orphanages called "cradles" and other institutions which marked the era of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.

The orphanages were a breeding ground for AIDS. Unsafe medical practices, badly screened blood, routine blood transfusions for underweight babies and antibiotics administered by injection all played a part in spreading AIDS to children.

Anne McNicholas, a nurse heading a British charity Health Aid UK, says the poverty, ignorance and propaganda that forced women to put their children into care has to be understood.

"They'd put them into these institutions thinking they'd be well cared for...without realizing that in some cases they were actually giving the children a death sentence," she says.

Vidra hospital, south of Bucharest, is the kind of place which sent shudders through westerners after 1989.

Conditions have improved dramatically.

Vidra caters for 80 HIV and AIDS children who still sleep 10 to a room in cots too small for them. But beds are said to be on order and the wards, with the help of Irish and Swiss charities, are clean and bright.

"You cannot compare what is now with what we had before," said Vidra medical director Dr. Angelica Paun.

Vidra also faces ignorance and prejudice. Local parents refuse to let their children near and workmen refuse to visit. An Irish charity built the hospital its own small school because the village school would not take students from the hospital.

Paun has worked at Vidra for 14 years. She blames childhood AIDS in Romania on poor hygiene, sterilisation and bad blood.

She says her AIDS children get genuine love and attention at Vidra. But they are still in an institution.

McNicholas's charity is trying a different approach, taking children out of institutions and putting them in houses where they live as a "family" with other children and house parents.

"We felt the children should not be confined to an institution only on the basis that they were HIV positive. If the child wasn't sick and wasn't symptomatic of AIDS we didn't feel that the child should be in hospital," she says.

HIV children live longer outside institutions, according to the British charity. Health Aid UK has six houses where children lead remarkably normal lives despite the shadow of death.

When one little boy developed full-blown AIDS recently he was allowed to stay at home and die quietly, surrounded by his friends and "parents" rather than an austere hospital ward.

McNicholas says that while there has been improvement in care westerners would still be shocked by Romanian institutions.

"They would still find some conditions are pretty horrendous and that these children's human rights are being denied every day," McNicholas said. "They have no right to education. They have no right to a life outside of a hospital. They are marginalized and there is prejudice against them."

Foreign aid agencies speak of constant frustration in dealing with Romanian authorities. The French arm of Medecins Sans Frontieres (Doctors without Borders) quit Romania this year saying it was tired of not being listened to.

"The situation of Romanian babies living in cradles or orphanages is getting worse and worse," MSF said.

Health Minister Iulian Mincu did not respond to requests for an interview but ministry AIDS specialist Dr. Valentina Simion told a recent seminar that testing and hygiene had improved and that most juvenile cases dated from before the revolution.

"This (crisis) is a result of the misery and poverty from the Communist times, of the demographical policy of that time," she said.

Some parents are fighting back against a state health system they say has handed their children a death sentence.

Violet Calinciuc is suing the government. She says her 6-year-old daugher Iasmina contracted AIDS while in a hospital with influenza: "I want to see that justice is served and human rights are observed in Romania. Human rights have been mocked in this country and my daughter's condition stands proof of that."

While children have so far borne the brunt of AIDS in Romania, aid agencies now fear an explosion of the disease among adults in a country where condoms are shunned, blood is sold and medical hygiene still leaves much to be desired.

More than 200 adult AIDS cases are recorded and 272 are officially noted as carrying HIV - not many in a population of 23 million but AIDS groups say testing is inadequate.

The Orthodox church frowns on condoms, as do Balkan males. "We don't sell many condoms," said one Bucharest shop assistant. "When we do sell them it's mainly women and girls who buy them."

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