Two million young children living with AIDS
More than two million children under the age of 15 are living with HIV, almost all in sub-Saharan Africa where there is no access to treatment and death is virtually guaranteed, seven leading child advocacy organisations said in a report yesterday.
“We are failing children,” said Dean Hirsch, chairman of the Global Movement for Children which issued an urgent appeal to governments, donors and the pharmaceutical industry to recognise a child’s right to treatment as a fundamental human right.
The report by the seven organisations which are part of the movement paints a grim picture of the impact of the disease on children: 700,000 children were infected with the HIV virus in 2005, bringing the total to 2.3 million, and 570,000 died of AIDS – one every minute.
“The deaths of these children are not inevitable,” said Hirsch, president of World Vision International, a Christian relief organisation. “An HIV positive child can respond to anti-retroviral treatment. So let’s deliver on the promise - the promise of treatment for all by 2010.”
Last year, world leaders at the UN summit and leaders of the seven richest industrialised nations and Russia pledged to come as close as possible to universal treatment by the end of the decade.
For this to happen, the report said special efforts must be made for children - first to provide drugs to pregnant women with HIV to prevent mother-to-child transmission, which is how 90% of children are infected with HIV. Youngsters with the virus must also be given antibiotics and anti-retroviral drugs, it said.
Currently, less than 5% of HIV positive children have access to the paediatric AIDS treatment they desperately need, the report said. “Without treatment, most children with HIV will die before their fifth birthday,” it said.
“Children are the missing face of the AIDS pandemic,” said Ann Veneman, executive director of the UN children’s agency, lamenting that in the 25 years since AIDS started spreading around the globe, the world has looked at it primarily as a disease of adults.
The UNICEF executive director urged world leaders to keep their commitment to a massive scaling up of HIV prevention, treatment and care.
Millions of children “have watched their worlds shatter around them because of this disease, losing parents, teachers, a sense of security and hope for the future,” Veneman said.
She called for simple diagnostic tests for young children, more and cheaper anti-retroviral drugs designed specifically for children, and improvement of health care systems in developing countries so youngsters can get treatment.
Charles MacCormack, president and CEO of Save the Children USA, said the percentage of girls and young women of child-bearing age with HIV is increasing, and therefore the risk of mother-to-child transmission is increasing even though effective and affordable treatments have been available for the past 15 years.
African governments pledged to spend 15% of their national budgets on public health systems but “less than one-third of those countries have achieved that goal,” MacCormack said. The Group of Eight also pledged significant increases in their funding for public health ”and to date those pledges haven’t been entirely kept either,” he said.
“So we suffer this tragedy of hundreds of thousands of unnecessary child deaths each year because we have not found a way to make the investments and deliver the health facilities to those in greatest need,” MacCormack said.
Veneman said a new AIDS report to be released on Tuesday – the eve of the UN General Assembly Special Session on AIDS – will show that investing in AIDS treatment and testing is now paying off in some areas with lower prevalence rates.
To stem the AIDS pandemic, the movement also backs sex education for young people.
Veneman said she has been told that in some African countries as many as one-third of women are forced to have their first sexual experience, and many are under the age of 18. They are children and this is not only abuse but it spreads AIDS, she said.
The four other organisations that commissioned the report are ENDA Tiers Monde, the Latin America and Caribbean Network for Children, Oxfam and Plan.
