From Haiti, a surprise: good news about AIDS

Ramon Espinosa/AP Photo Micheline Leon, a woman living with HIV/AIDS, poses for a photo with her children in Cange, in central Haiti. Haitian infection rates dropped from 6.2 percent to 3.1 percent among expectant mothers in the last 15 years. Researchers recently switched to a new methodology that tests all adults, which puts Haiti’s official rate at 2.2 percent, according to UNAIDS. 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... [read full story]                    

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