Published: October 26, 2005
UNICEF Campaign Launch Helps AIDS Children
By Judy Aita, Washington File 
Children are "the missing face" of AIDS, U.N. officials say
United Nations -- Launching a worldwide campaign to focus on the millions of children affected by HIV/AIDS, officials of UNICEF and UNAIDS said October 25 that fewer than 5 percent of HIV-positive children receive treatment and millions of orphans are without help.
The campaign -- Unite for Children, Unite Against AIDS -- will focus attention on the enormous impact of HIV/AIDS on children and mobilize funds and services. The campaign aims to achieve measurable progress in basic care and prevention by 2010.
UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman said that "25 years into the pandemic, this very visible disease continues to have an invisible face -- a missing face -- a child's face."
Today a generation of young people never has known a world free of HIV/AIDS and has been forced "to grow up alone, too fast or, sadly, not at all," she said.
Every day 1,800 children under age 15 are infected by HIV/AIDS; an estimated 15 million children have lost one or both parents to AIDS, Veneman said. "The size of the problem is staggering, but the world has been largely unresponsive" to the plight of children affected by the pandemic, she said.
ONE CHILD'S STORY
To illustrate the devastation AIDS can cause, Kerrel McKay of Jamaica described her own experience to diplomats, agency officials and celebrities attending the event at U.N. headquarters.
At the age of nine, she learned her father had AIDS and "that was, in effect, the end of my childhood," she said. "I know from my own life that children are the missing face of AIDS. I know how necessary it is to give children affected by AIDS the attention they deserve."
Describing how she cared for her father for six years -- cooking, cleaning, shopping and taking him to the doctor after school -- McKay said she lacked money for school supplies or to buy food for dinner. "I would sit in class feeling lost," she said.
Given the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS, McKay said that she was afraid to reveal her "secret," and at age 15 was "emotionally unprepared" for her father's death. "I couldn't bear the thought of seeing or even hearing about his death, so I decided to kill myself first," McKay said.
Luckily she reached out to Jamaica AIDS Support where "a kind woman . . . kept me on the phone for hours and gave me the hope to go on," McKay said.
For millions of other children, however, "there is nobody," McKay said. "The little support that exists for the 15 million children orphaned by AIDS and the million more living in the shadow of their parent's illness is not enough."
CAMPAIGN GOALS
The Unite for Children, Unite Against AIDS campaign has four main goals for the coming five years:
Reaching 80 percent of women who need services to prevent mother-to-child transmission;
Providing treatment to 80 percent of infected children;
Reducing the percentage of young people living with HIV/AIDS by 25 percent; and
Reaching 80 percent of the children who need protection and support.
The vast majority of the 500,000 children under the age of 15 who die from AIDS-related illnesses each year are infected through mother-to-child transmission, UNAIDS says. Yet fewer than 10 percent of pregnant women have access to treatment that will prevent transmission. Without that treatment, 25 percent of children born to HIV-positive women contract the virus.
North America and Europe have reduced HIV infections in young children to almost zero and small pilot programs in 11 sub-Saharan African countries have shown that simple regimens based on increasingly affordable anti-retroviral drugs could reduce mother-to-child transmissions by up to 50 percent, the agency said.
Despite improved access to anti-retroviral therapy for adults, fewer than 5 percent of HIV-positive children are receiving pediatric AIDS treatment, UNAIDS said. Cotrimoxazole, a low-cost treatment for deadly infection, is available for as little as 3 cents a day, but only 1 percent of children in need have access to it.
Studies have shown that more than two decades into the epidemic, the vast majority of young people around the world still have no idea how HIV is transmitted or how to protect themselves from the virus, UNAIDS also said.
Young people need youth-friendly health services where they can get condoms, obtain treatment for sexually transmitted infections and seek advice, UNICEF officials said.
To ensure that communities and families receive help, UNICEF said its campaign will support programs to strengthen families, mobilize community responses and ensure that orphans and children have access to health care and education.
A GLOBAL CAMPAIGN
Even though the suffering is greatest in sub-Saharan Africa, children also are suffering in Asia, Central and Eastern Europe, Latin American and the Caribbean, Veneman said. "The campaign is global because the threat to children is global."
On October 25, UNICEF sent more than 15 million text messages to mobile phone customers in Africa and Asia to draw attention to the HIV/AIDS affected children and to seek support for the new initiative, Veneman said.
UNAIDS says $55 billion will be needed over the next three years to confront the AIDS pandemic and reports a funding gap of at least $18 billion for 2005 to 2007.
For additional information on HIV/AIDS and on U.S. efforts to fight the disease, see HIV/AIDS and AIDS in Africa.
Source: U.S. Department of State
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