In this May 7, 2009 photo, patients with HIV/AIDS wait to be attended at the Partners in Health hospital 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. (AP Photo/Ramon Espinosa)From Yahoo News/AP:
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 had escaped Haiti's dictatorship, experts thought it could wipe out a third of the country's population.
Instead, Haiti's HIV infection rate stayed in the single digits, then plummeted.
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