A New Generation: Teenagers Living with HIV

On the surface, Alora Gale of Boulder, Colo., is an average teenager. But unlike most teenagers, Alora seems cautious, wary and fragile. She has good reason. In 1993, her mother, Linda, was found to have AIDS. Tests showed that Alora and her younger brother had also been infected, almost certainly while in their mother's womb. In 1995, at age 10, Alora watched her mother's slow, painful decline and death. "Losing my mom was really hard," she said. "But the hardest part may have been that this disease that was killing her was also in my body."

Alora is part of the first generation of children born with HIV to reach adolescence. In the past, most babies born with the virus had little hope of living long enough to enter high school. According to data from the CDC, before the mid-1990s, children with HIV lived to an average age of 9. But thanks to breakthroughs in antiretroviral medication, since 1996 the average age has risen to 13 to 15 and is going up. There are now 2,400 adolescents who were born with HIV, and thousands more who will turn 13 over the next five years.

"The medications will always be there for these kids," said Dr. Joseph A. Church, director of the Children's AIDS Center at Children's Hospital in Los Angeles, "so what we have to do is spend time talking about dating and relationships and the futures they didn't think they were going to have."

Hydeia Broadbent, 17, of Las Vegas is an accomplished public speaker who has won numerous awards and accolades for her AIDS activism. She even has a foundation in her name. But privately, she struggles with a fickle short-term memory, a result of HIV-related brain damage. Hydeia was also very ill as a child and did not attend school until the seventh grade.

Dr. Robert Johnson, director of adolescent and young adult medicine at the New Jersey Medical School in Newark, said, "Many of these kids have been so overprotected, often by grandparents that are now raising them, that they don't know how to act independently in the world."

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