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Yui (pseudonym), a 22-year-old college student, worries whenever she thinks of looking for a job after graduation early in the year. next year. She has heard many stories of people who had to leave their jobs after the results of their blood tests showed that they were HIV-positive.
Her father died when she was just a year old and her mother died the following year. She lived in Chiang Mai with her grandmother, while a foundation intervened to care for Yui, sick because of the virus.
Yui, however, eliminates her worries by saying that she must look for a job to make a living and support her aging grandmother. Having taken antiretroviral drugs regularly, she has generally been in good health and hopes to find a job as part of her study, possibly within a government agency. However, she does not know if she will have to have a blood test.
Yui wants one day to have his own family. She has a boyfriend who is not HIV-positive but who, with her neighbors, is aware of her condition. However, she took care not to tell anyone at the university.
Yui is not the only person to have this problem.
Thanutkan Thanutamornthanasiri, coordinator of the Northeast Aids Network, cited many cases of young job seekers who were rejected after being tested positive.
A graduate of a Bung Kan vocational high school was rejected by a mall, after a blood test gave a positive result for HIV, she said.
In another case, it would be a teaching badistant in a nursery of a local administrative body. She had only been working for two days when a person who knew about her HIV status informed the boss and the community, sending her away from the daycare, Thanutkan said. The badistant professor was suspended without even having a blood test. The administrators stated that they would find him a "more suitable position without direct contact with the children".
The teaching badistant is a mother of two who is not HIV-positive and studies in a different district.
Nimit Tien-udom, director of the Aids Access Foundation, confirms that stigma remains a major problem and that because of its negative consequences, people living with HIV are afraid to reveal their condition.
Many people are discriminated against in public or private workplaces in the form of a mandatory blood test, said Nimit, citing numerous complaints about it.
Chatsuda Chandeeyin, commissioner of the National Commission on Human Rights (CNDH), said the agency had received numerous complaints of discrimination during his candidacy, with the public and private sectors demanding candidates who would They undergo a blood test for HIV testing.
Not only are more and more HIV-positive people facing stigma, even children whose parents are HIV-positive or who themselves are HIV-positive are also being rejected by schools. Many children are sent to distant countries, where no one knows anything about their HIV-positive parents.
Thailand has 500,000 people living with HIV – many of whom are in school or of working age.
Thanutkan said that his network had received last year seven or eight cases of children, whose parents were HIV positive, rejected schools.
In 2016, a school in Nakhon Phanom hit the headlines after a clbadmate's parents forced a child whose parents were HIV positive to have a blood test.
The child was not HIV-positive, but this "unjustified" action prompted the parents to transfer the child to another school, she said.
More and more such cases will emerge in the future as people living with HIV also want to have children, and antiretroviral drugs help them to treat uninfected children, said Thanutkan, urging society to be more understanding and offer opportunities.
She recounted her own experience of losing two children who lived less than a year in 1992 and 1996. In 1997, her husband died.
"If we had access to antiretroviral drugs like now, my children would still be alive," she added.
In 2005, she married another man and wanted to have a child, because the result of his test revealed no active virus. At that time, the treatment allowed her to become pregnant without transmitting the virus to the child. Now, his son is studying at Mathayom 2 in a municipal school, where his friends and relatives know his work as a network.
When she told him about her condition three years ago, the son said, "It's okay mom. You are like the others. "
In Thailand, since 1988, there had been a system for reporting HIV infection in pregnant women, and the Department of Health had been badociated with the Thai Red Cross AIDS Research Center to put HIV in place. a project to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV (PMTCT).
In 2016, the World Health Organization certified that Thailand – the first country in the Asia-Pacific region and the second-largest country in the world after Cuba to maintain the mother-to-child transmission rate of HIV below 2% – had eliminated transmission to the child HIV and syphilis. In 2016 and 2017, the rate of children born with HIV was respectively 1.80 and 0.92%.
A source at the home of the Chiang Rai-based Ban Nam Jai Foundation, which has been sheltering HIV-positive women and their children for decades, has announced that the last family of a tribal mother and two (seronegative) sons would soon be leaving, while his eldest son was about to graduate from college and that second son was studying at Mathayom 2. The home will help the mother find a job and a rented house, while the eldest son was soon to find a job, the source said.
The source also raised concerns about young people born with HIV and adults with jobs and partners. There are more and more cases of young people who have hidden their HIV-positive status from loved ones, stopped taking antiretroviral drugs and eventually developed HIV / AIDS in their own right.
To commemorate World AIDS Day on December 1, The Nation will hold a two-part series on people living with HIV / AIDS. The first part focuses on how they fight against stigma in Thai society, while the second will focus on efforts to end AIDS by 2030.
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