Children Born With AIDS Face a Brief, Bleak Future

Nine-year-old Celeste has big brown eyes and long brown hair. She also has no mother, no father, no little brother and almost no hope.

“All in all, she’s been one of the lucky ones,” says Anita Septimus, head of social services at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, which runs the nation’s largest pediatric AIDS clinic.

Celeste is among a growing number of children who are victims of congenital AIDS. They must pay with their future for a parent’s past--a problem that becomes more common as the disease enters the heterosexual population.

Both of Celeste’s parents were intravenous drug users who contracted AIDS; her mother died in 1983, her father died last year. Celeste and her brother were infected in the uterus. He died Christmas Eve.

Every two weeks, to assist and extend her fragile life, Celeste is given treatments of gamma globulin--blood serum that contains a high concentration of antibodies.

She is the oldest youngster of more than a dozen treated there. Some, less than a year old, are born to die; others face years of battling the disease and the cruel ostracism that often surrounds it. In either case, the prognosis for such children remains invariably pessimistic, specialists say.

“We have never seen anybody who has beaten the disease,” Einstein’s Dr. Larry Bernstein said recently. “I think you get to a certain point and hope you can stay there, not deteriorate further.”

Recent state Health Department figures indicate that the potential number of AIDS-infected newborns is growing at a startling rate. One in every 61 babies born in New York City last November carried antibodies to the AIDS virus, which means that they had been exposed to the virus.

About 40% of these children will develop acquired immune deficiency syndrome in some form; 25% to 30% of those children will be dead before their second birthday. Most of them were born to mothers who used drugs intravenously.

Dr. Stephen Joseph, the city health commissioner, put the number of children born in the city with AIDS antibodies last year at about 600; for 1988 the projection is 1,000. Between 1980 and 1986, the total was only about 250 children.

In fact, AIDS babies were cited as the reason for the first increase in New York City’s infant mortality rate since 1974.

One reason for the spurt is the large number of addicts in New York City. Intravenous drug abusers make up almost half the city’s AIDS population, while in San Francisco and most other cities with large AIDS populations, most sufferers are homosexual.

But even in Massachusetts, a state not known for large outbreaks of AIDS, one in 476 child-bearing women tested positive for AIDS antibodies, according to a study reported recently in the New England Journal of Medicine.

Nationwide, there were 865 cases of pediatric AIDS reported as of Feb. 29, with 111 diagnosed in just the first two months of the year. Altogether, 518 children are known to have died of AIDS.

The Bronx Municipal Hospital Day Care Center, the nation’s first day-care facility for AIDS-infected children, opened in June, 1986, to help out; Septimus said another is planned for Einstein.

About 65% of the Einstein kids live in foster homes, she said. But some have spent so much time in hospitals, in broken homes or at arm’s length from a terrified society that social skills like speaking have not been properly developed.

“Some of the older kids have a sense of it, but even the ones who are older have physical delays--an 8-year-old with the intelligence of a 5-year-old,” said Bernstein.