Missionary Works to Reduce Mother/Child HIV

Posted: 1st July 2004

PHNOM PENH (UCAN) As the AIDS epidemic in Cambodia spawns new infections reportedly at the rate of 100 a day, a Filipina lay missioner is working with pregnant HIV mothers and their newborn babies to turn the tide.

Beatriz Millena, a professional midwife and lay missioner in Cambodia, has joined with the Maryknoll Association to focus on the plight of pregnant mothers and their vulnerable offspring. The association, registered as an NGO, comprises Maryknoll lay and associate priest missioners.

For eight years the association has been helping in preventive efforts to combat AIDS and providing basic support for poor people with HIV/AIDS and their family members. Last year it established a home in Phnom Penh to care for children with HIV.

Meanwhile, it took over a government-established pilot project to provide medicine that decreases the chance of a newborn child of a mother with HIV testing positive for the virus.

Millena, 29, from Davao del Sur province in the southern Philippines, works in this program. She belongs to a group of consecrated lay missioners in the Philippines associated with the Quebec Foreign Mission Society, a Maryknoll mission partner in Cambodia.

Estimates suggest that 170,000 people are infected with HIV in Cambodia, a country of 12.77 million people, and that 3,500 HIV-positive babies are delivered each year.

Millena told UCA News: "The situation here is really terrible since most of the children in our care are abandoned or have been orphaned since their parents died because of AIDS. Nobody takes care of them. They need to be loved and cared for ## an essential and important experience they should have."

She explained her work involves prevention of the transmission of the virus from the mother to the child by providing a single Nevirapine tablet to the mother during delivery and giving 2 milligrams of Nevirapine suspension to the baby within 72 hours of birth.

"We have been doing it during the last year with very good results. From June 2002 till now, we have helped to deliver 46 children. In July 2003 we have 13 pregnant mothers under our care," she said.

Millena says she usually brings the mothers to a hospital, takes a blood test and performs a prenatal check up.

"If they are about to deliver, we help them have the delivery at the hospital, provide medicines, and pay the hospital expenses."

She also helps feed the baby with milk formula supplied by the Maryknoll Association, since HIV transmission can occur through breast-feeding.

"After the birth, I do a weekly follow up by visiting them at their homes. Through our conversations, they share their difficulties in being a mother with HIV," Millena reported. She described how some live alone in very small houses, either as widows after their husband died of AIDS or abandoned after their medical condition became known to their husband.

"They are isolated too because family, relatives and neighbors discriminate against the mothers," she added.

"They feel so hopeless, which is why I try to stay with them a little longer and extend my visits. I feel that they need so desperately to be comforted in a situation which is truly not easy to handle, and which makes them so miserable," Millena said.

She called herself graced to have this experience, "even though it's not an easy task and often requires so much effort" physically and emotionally.

"As a missionary," she said, "I feel that what I'm doing now is the real task for me in a way that I can share the compassion of Christ which I fully desire and live with. This experience therefore makes my life both meaningful and inspiring."

The U.N. agency UNAIDS reports that though Cambodia is "the Asian country with the highest adult HIV prevalence," the prevalence among pregnant women in major urban areas declined from 3.2 percent in 1996 to 2.8 percent in 2002.

Its 2002 fact sheet on HIV/AIDS and sexually transmitted infections for Cambodia says there were 74,000 women and 12,000 children with HIV who were alive as the end of 2001. It estimates that 12,000 adults and children died because of AIDS during that year. It also estimates that at the end of the year, 55,000 orphans below age 15 years who had lost one or both parents due to AIDS were living in the country.

E-mail of Beatriz Millena:
milbea2006@yahoo.com
smecambodia@camnet.com.kh

Article Source: UCANEWS and C.S.C.