He takes his antiretroviral (ARV) medicine regularly and practices safe sex. She said ‘I will always be at your side to support you’.” My mother couldn’t accept what had happened, but I told my teacher and she helped me through it. “I was shocked and confused,” he recalls. He searched online and found a clinic that did anonymous HIV tests. Within a year, Kawee started developing AIDS symptoms, including loss of appetite and diarrhoea. “But I carried on having sex without condoms … I didn’t think HIV would affect me.” “My teacher taught us about HIV, showed us images of AIDS patients, which was scary,” he says. It wasn’t until he was 14 that Kawee found out about HIV through sexuality education at school.
After that I had many different boyfriends. “I always knew I was different than other boys,” Kawee says. When he was around 15, he found out he had HIV after several years of unprotected sex with older men. His father abandoned them both when he was very young. With improved treatment access and reduced HIV infection rates among children In recent years, the next step is to increase prevention – especially among at-risk youth and adolescents – by promoting measures like pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and raising awareness in schools and communities.īANGKOK, Thailand, 1 December 2016 – In Bangkok, 18-year-old Kawee* lives in a single rented room with his mother, a supermarket cashier.
