By Sangeeta Dasmohapatra | Project Leader
Osmanabad district of Maharashtra State in India has 30 % of state’s BPL families of the state. Maharashtra is one of the five high prevalence states in India with respect to HIV/AIDS with 32 districts under Category A of which Osmanabad is one of the districts. The total estimated number of HIV positive persons in Maharashtra is around 4.62 lakh, which accounts for 20 % of the total estimated HIV infected persons in the country and second highest after Andhra Pradesh with 4.85 lakh HIV positive persons (21 %).
SPARSH through its interventions has found that there are many children who are affected by HIV/AIDS. SPARSH has already identified around 100 HIV positive children in Osmanabad whose parents have died of AIDS
These orphaned children’s caregivers are now essentially living with aging grandparents, some of who cannot even afford full day meal for the child. In the absence of proper care & support, these children are becoming increasingly vulnerable. Some such children are known to have died due to absence of proper care, nutrition and ART adherence.
It is in this perspective we have initiated a program to provide nutritional support to ensure ART adherence for orphaned children and also required counseling to the caregivers.
Objective:To ensure care and support for the Orphaned children through nutritional support, counseling, ART adherence and providing sustainable livelihood to the care giver to take care of the child.
The project aims to ensure healthy and secure life to these children by ensuring access to quality medicine, supplementary nutrition, psychological support and livelihood support to the caregivers, etc. Parents/ Caregivers are also sensitized on importance of the education and proper care for such children. Livelihood support to parents and caregivers was provided to sustain children’s education and nutrition support. Below is the improvement in the status of health of these children.
Improvement in immunological stage among CLHIV:
Below table-1 and figure-1 shows comparative scenario of improvement in immunological stage among 73 CLHIV in the last one year. It is evident that in the beginning of the year 17 children were in “Severe immune suppression” stage and their CD4 count was below 200. After the comprehensive intervention along with nutritional supplement support, there has been significant improvement in CD4 count among these children and 12 of them moved to moderate /improved immune levels. With continued treatment and nutritious support most of these children had improved their health status and CD4 level and thus have moved to ‘’non-significant immune suppression” stage.
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