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Article: Haiti sees surprising decline in AIDS rate: ; Country first contained disease by closing blood banks; use of drugs, education reduce spread
- Article from:
- Charleston Daily Mail
- Article date:
- July 6, 2009
- Author:
CopyrightCopyright 2009 Charleston Daily Mail. Provided by ProQuest LLC. (Hide copyright information)
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BLANCHARD, Haiti - When Micheline Leon was diagnosed with HIV,
her parents told her they would fit her for a coffin.
Fifteen years later, she walks around her two-room concrete house
on Haiti's central plateau, watching her four children play under
the plantain trees. She looks healthy, her belly amply filling a
gray, secondhand T-shirt. Her three sons and one daughter were born
after she was diagnosed. None has the virus.
"I'm not sick," she explained patiently on a recent afternoon.
"People call me sick but I'm not. I'm infected."
In many ways the 35-year-old mother's story is Haiti's too. In
the early 1980s, when the strange and terrifying disease showed up
in the U.S. among migrants who ...