Effects of HIV Infection

Posted by admin on July 1, 2008

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Today AIDS has become a family issue especially because the death of the victim adds up to family problems. People from the first world countries might not have realized the effects of HIV infection as those of third world countries. The reason being that this scourge only add to the intolerable problems these people have to live with more so because they extremely poor.

The illness and death of a female due to AIDS normally has a particularly dramatic impact on the families of these poor countries because many cultures expect her to bring the bread on the table.

Social effects

In most of these third world countries where culture and traditions forms the better parts of the natives, a girl child is normally disregarded as inferior while her brother is the most important. From this argument therefore, it is possible that girls will normally drop out for school to settle for early marriages as second or what ever number wives.

If she never learned how to read and write while she had the short term opportunity to acquire preliminary education, she can not learn any facts about HIV infection. If her old husband dies, it is culturally right for her to be inherited by her husband’s brother even if he has AIDS. This makes her vulnerable as well considering that the same cultures do not recognize protected intercourse.

With the AIDS looming, men prefer young women for their sexual satisfaction, believing that they less likely to get the infection from these girls. They mislead and entice them in to having intercourse with them, and so of these men are already infected with the HIV virus and other venereal infections. They then face strict socio stigma since they are said to be loose wives

Health effects

It goes without saying that victims of HIV infection have a myriad of short-term infections that plague them to a level of an early death. Most of the births performed in many of these developing countries perhaps seventy percent, are done by traditional midwives. If the environment at which this is done is not safe, HIV infection can be spread first to the mother, baby and the attendant.

If the instruments used are sterilized and shared, chances of infection will be lowered but if does not take caution, the much blood that flows during child that could be containing the virus or the likely hood of open wounds would increase the vulnerability of one catching this disease.

Economic effects

Supposing that both parents are eliminated by AIDS, the first born child no matter how old they might be automatically becomes the bread winner for the younger ones. This would mean him dropping out of school in order to search for any job to supplement the small scale output from the garden. Some of these kids also run away from home to the streets, sometimes raped and exposed to the same virus that killed his or her parents. Girls might choose to feed their siblings from entering the wide field of prostitution at least to place food on the table.

At some instances you might find wives knows that their husbands are having affairs with multiple partners but they decide to sit on their emotional pain and say nothing to question his habits. Why? Because she will be kicked out of the house. She will also say yes to such a husband’s advances on their marital bed, because of the same reasons, thus making her susceptible to HIV virus.

Drugs are expensive, and many die early because they can not afford to purchase them.