The mother of a 7-year-old boy in Missouri whose father allegedly deliberately infected him with the AIDS virus said yesterday the child was fighting to live and was holding his own.
"We live daily with the realisation that he will die of this disease or the complications related to it," she said, fighting back tears. "He will never be out of danger."
The woman, who did not give her name, appeared at a news conference two days after her former boyfriend, Mr Brian Stewart (31), was charged with first-degree assault.
St Charles county officials said Mr Stewart, of Columbia, Illinois, fathered the child, and in 1992, when the boy was 11 months old, allegedly injected him with the HIV virus. The sheriff's office said the motive was to avoid paying child support.
The boy's mother said she had decided to make a public statement to ask for privacy from the media. The boy now had full-blown AIDS but was holding his own, she added.
"He is feeling much better and is able to enjoy his childhood." He was medicated through a stomach tube and had to be awakened four times a night to receive medicines, she said.
Mr Stewart allegedly obtained the blood through his work as a medical technician. He has been jailed in lieu of a $500,000 cash bond.
Although the number of new AIDS cases in the United States has declined substantially in recent years, HIV continues to spread through the population essentially unabated, according to data released by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.
The first direct assessment of HIV infection trends shows that the recent decline in US AIDS cases is not due to a notable drop in new infections. Rather, improved medical treatments are allowing infected people to stay healthy longer before coming down with AIDS, masking the reality of an increasingly infected populace.
Mr Thomas C. Quinn, an AIDS specialist at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said "mortality may be going down - therapy is working - but HIV continues its relentless march into and through our population."
The findings also confirm previously identified trends showing that women and minorities are increasingly at risk. Especially worrisome, officials said, is that the annual number of new infections in young men and women aged 13 to 24, a group that has been heavily targeted for prevention efforts, is virtually unchanged in recent years.