Video Helps Kids With HIV Send a Positive Message

It's difficult enough convincing healthy children to eat their veggies. How do you get kids with HIV to take as many as 20 to 40 pills a day to keep the AIDS virus in check? Let them talk directly to other youngsters diagnosed with HIV.

Six children, age 7 to 14, do just that in Kids2Kids: Medication Dedication, a new video produced by The Health Channel. Pharmaceutical giant Hoffman-LaRoche and the Baylor International Pediatric AIDS Initiative, a pediatric HIV treatment program run by Baylor College of Medicine and Texas Children's Hospital, hired The Health Channel to put together an educational yet inspirational message for HIV-infected children. Hoffman-LaRoche plans to distribute thousands of copies of the tape to pediatric AIDS clinics internationally.

"Take your medicine and you can accomplish anything you want to when you grow up," says 12-year-old Nathan who was diagnosed with HIV at birth.

"Don't listen to people who tell you that you're nothing and you can't be a part or can't do things like they can just because you have the disease," counsels 10-year-old Crystal, who's been taking her AIDS medication since she was 2. Both contracted the disease from their mothers.

The children not only participated in the video by speaking on camera, but they also helped conceptualize and build the program by interviewing one another and discussing the importance of taking their medication.

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©2006 Texas Medical Center

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