| Romania,
until 1989 has been under communist rule for 46 years. Under the
regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, conditions in Romania worsened over
time. Not only did he run the economy into the ground, he required
women of childbearing age to have at least 5 children. The combination
of the poor economy along with too many mouths to feed left many
women with no other option than to abandon their children at hospitals
or orphanages. The orphanages essentially collapsed under the
weight of these abandoned and orphaned children. As a result,
these children now exist under extremely difficult living conditions.
To compound
this problem even further, Romania has one of the highest rates
of pediatric HIV cases in the world. Why? As the world was beginning
to take steps to protect blood supplies, Romania continued to
follow past practices of routine blood transfusions with unscreened
blood for infants who suffered from anemia, this along with
needle sharing (often sharing one needle for an entire ward
of children to cut down on the cost of medical supplies) has
put our country in the terrible place of losing our children.
To our horror, thousands of Romanian children are now infected
with HIV.
Needless
to say, the road to recovery in Romania has been a rocky one.
The health care budget has been stripped so the hospitals are
alarmingly poor. Unemployment is skyrocketing as most Romanian
industries struggle, and the number of families living below
the poverty line is rising steadily.
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