12-year-old with HIV applauded at AIDS conference

• IBTimes RSS
• Print
• E-Mail
• digg
• Del.icio.us

Now the 12-year-old is one of the most prominent AIDS activists in Latin America and a rarity in a region where few children are willing to break the silence and tell their classmates they have HIV for fear of rejection. She edits a children's magazine on the virus.

"The boys and girls who live with HIV are here and we are growing up with many goals," Keren said Sunday at the opening of an international AIDS conference where she shared the stage with Mexican President Felipe Calderon and U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.

"We want to be artists, teachers, doctors even get married and have kids. ... But achieving these goals will only be possible when we receive the attention we need, when we are guaranteed the medicines that we need, when we are accepted in schools."

Taking several deep breaths to overcome stage jitters, Keren delivered what was clearly the star speech of the conference's inauguration: Audience members repeatedly interrupted her brief, but moving words with loud applause and whistles, and followed her discourse with a standing ovation that lasted well after she left the stage.

In an interview with The Associated Press days before the conference, Keren talked matter-of-factly about the virus she has had since birth, flashing a dimpled smile and exposing a row of braces.

"It's like a little ball that has little dots, and is inside me, sort of swimming inside me," she said, curling her fist as she recalled what her parents explained to her with drawings long ago.

Keren's openness about her HIV status comes as the virus's victims grow increasingly younger.

Worldwide, people ages 15-24 accounted for 45 percent of people infected with HIV in 2007, according to the 2008 U.N. AIDS report.

In Latin America, 55,000 of the nearly 2 million people with the virus were under 15 years old, the vast majority of them infected by their mothers. Only 36 percent of pregnant women in the region receive medicine to prevent transmission, although that is an increase of 26 percent since 2004.

• 1
• 2
• 3