Catholic Information Service for Africa (Nairobi)
8 August 2008
Mexico City — Children have been severely neglected in the response to AIDS, and new policies and funding must be significantly refocused to achieve what they should for children, the XVII International AIDS Conference was told.
"Children have been short-changed in the response to AIDS. They are visible in the photo opportunities and headlines, but mostly invisible in the response to HIV," Prof Linda Richter of the Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa, said.
The UN AIDS agency UNAIDS estimates that 2 million children aged 0-14 were living with HIV in 2007 - an eight-fold increase since 1990 - while both new infections and deaths among children have grown three-fold in the same period.
Some 370, 000 children became newly infected with HIV last year and about 270, 000 children died. About 90 percent of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa, where an estimated 12.1 million children have also lost one or both parents to the AIDS epidemic.
While the global response to AIDS has accelerated, prevention, treatment and care of children continue to lag behind. The overwhelming majority of children who are HIV-positive are infected through mother-to-child transmission. Despite recent progress, services to prevent mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT) in low-and middle- income countries - the effectiveness of which has been established for over 10 years - reach only a third of those that need them.
Children living with HIV have far less access to treatment than do adults in the same circumstances. Only about 10 percent of children living with HIV are receiving ART worldwide.
There are serious gaps in the data on children and HIV, and the evidence that does exist is often overlooked. For example, very little is known about infections among children between infancy and 15 years of age, despite household surveys in countries showing significant levels of HIV prevalence in this age group.
Current approaches to children affected by HIV/AIDS too often focus only on "AIDS orphans", to the detriment of other needy children and families. Targeting interventions specifically to orphans or AIDS-affected children is neither helpful nor efficient in hard-hit communities where there is widespread poverty and destitution.
"Children orphaned by AIDS are, sadly, only the tip of the iceberg of HIV-affected children," said Prof Richter. "Our primary focus in designing and implementing policies must be the actual needs of all children affected by HIV/AIDS, not whether they meet an agency's definition of 'orphan'."
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