It was devastating enough when Nina Shearer learned that her 3-year-old daughter - her only child - had AIDS. But Mrs. Shearer's trauma deepened as she and her daughter, Jackie, were gradually cut off from the world they had known.
Mrs. Shearer gave up her job as a visiting lecturer in the design department at the University of California in Los Angeles last October and moved to New York so Jackie, who doctors say contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion, could be part of an experimental AIDS program at Children's Hospital in Newark.
Mrs. Shearer's husband, from whom she was separated, stayed behind. She says her mother has stopped visiting. Her closest friends have become distant.
Now Mrs. Shearer depends for human contact on two virtual strangers who have come into her life through a volunteer program started by the Gay Men's Health Crisis last fall in an effort to reach children with acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a usually fatal disease that cripples the immune system.
Jackie is among the more than 300 children under the age of 13 in the New York City area who have AIDS or preliminary symptoms of the disease. Health experts estimate there are 600 such children nationwide.
Unlike Jackie, most of the AIDS children in the New York City area were born to women who were intravenous drug users or who were infected, through sexual contact, by drug-using mates. Most are children of poverty, whose families are often disintegrating.
In some cases a parent has already died of AIDS. Sometimes the children were placed in foster care by parents who were unable to raise them before their illness was diagnosed. Other children are abandoned in hospitals by natural or foster families.
Besides visiting the children at home and in the hospital, the volunteers counsel and comfort the families, help them get social services if they are eligible and arrange for home-care attendants. The children also need day-care centers, hospices and other special program that, for the most part, do not yet exist in New York City, health experts say.
Apart from newborn children who get the disease from infected mothers, AIDS is transmitted by intimate sexual contact, the sharing of hypodermic needles and, less commonly, blood transfusions, health experts say.
The Centers for Disease Control says that not one family member of the more than 13,000 AIDS victims reported to it has become infected with the virus, despite what in many cases have been years of close contact with an infected person, including kissing and sharing of tableware and bathrooms.
Mrs. Smithies, the mother of four, recently went to the South Bronx to visit one of her clients - 4-year-old Kizzie Moreno. Kizzie, who has been in and out of Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, is currently living at home with her mother, Betty Cloud, and five brothers and sisters.
Mrs. Cloud said her daughter had contracted AIDS through a blood transfusion that she received shortly after birth. She said Kizzie's father, who does not live with the family, had been in a methadone treatment program for intravenous drug users.
When Mrs. Smithies arrived, laden with stuffed animals and children's clothes, an overjoyed Kizzie jumped into her arms. Mrs. Cloud and the other children smiled shyly.
Nationally 152 children have died of AIDS, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Since the Gay Men's Health Crisis program began last fall, one its children -an 8-year-old boy, Omalik, in Harlem -has died of AIDS.
For his birthday, which he celebrated two months before he died, Omalik asked for a red two-wheeler bicycle. Mr. Zakrzewski got it for him through the Gay Men's Health Crisis.
Omalik died Jan. 24, before he had a chance to get strong enough to ride the bicycle. Mr. Zakrzewski went to his funeral in Harlem.