Tuesday, October 31, 2006

{in the news} AIDS and children

Africa's forgotten HIV children

Children with HIV and Aids in the developing world are half as likely as adults to get life-saving drugs. This means fewer than one in 10 of over two million children infected get anti-retroviral treatment (ARVs).

Nkhosibona is very shy. He sits in his mother's arms, wriggling and putting his head on her shoulder.

His father died of Aids three years ago and his mother Phindile is HIV-positive. But what she can't do, like thousands of others, is find out if her boy is infected too.

"I don't have money, the hospitals are too far, I have to go by bus," she says. "There are many families here facing the same problem."

I ask her what happens to those children.

"We wait until they get ill and die," she says.

The first barrier to treatment is diagnosis. Just like Nkhosibona, more than 90% of those with HIV in the developing world don't know they have the disease.

Half of all children born with the illness will die before their fifth birthday.

"Children have been the missing face in the fight against HIV and Aids because they don't speak for themselves and they cannot be tested until they are over 18 months," says Pelucy Ntambirweki of the UN children's charity, Unicef, based in Swaziland.

Read the rest of Angus Crawford's report here.


Staging sex myths to save Zimbabwe's girls

Zimbabwe's most prominent organisation fighting child sexual abuse is confronting traditional healers to take action over the myth that having sex with a virgin can cure Aids - one reason behind the rape of young girls.

In a rural area some 200km east of Harare, a play is being acted out.

An HIV-positive man visits a traditional healer and is advised to have sex with a virgin in order to be cured.

The reasoning is that the blood produced by raping a virgin will cleanse the virus from the infected person's blood.

It is part of the Girl Child Network project and was staged at a girl's empowerment village, where rape survivors are given safe accommodation, counselling and training in life-skills.

Traditional healers from all of the country's provinces recently attended a meeting here, along with chiefs, a government minister and religious leaders, where many of the girls stood up and gave accounts of the abuse that they had suffered.

Read the rest of Steve Vickers' report here.

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