Inter Press Service - October 28, 2005
Martin Schuijt

"He never spoke about AIDS, even to me," said McKay, who is now 20. "But I know that speaking out and getting the world to recognise the toll that AIDS is taking on children is the only way to beat this pandemic."

McKay received help from Jamaican AIDS support groups, inspiring her to become an AIDS activist herself. She founded a youth branch of the U.N.-supported Portland AIDS Committee and has become a voice for orphans and children affected by the devastating disease.

"Children who are infected and affected do need practical help -- food, clothes, drugs, education, and above all family and peer support," she said at the launch this week of a five-year campaign by the United Nations children's agency UNICEF, the joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and other partners to "Unite for Children, Unite Against AIDS".

Every minute, a child dies of an AIDS-related illness. Every 15 seconds, a young person between the ages of 15 and 24 becomes infected with HIV. Meanwhile, fewer than five percent of HIV-positive children in need of antiretroviral drugs receive them.

And millions of others end up caring for sick parents, like Kerrel McKay.

UNICEF Executive Director Ann Veneman called AIDS "a very visible disease with an invisible face -- the face of a child."

Jeannette Kagame, first lady of Rwanda, said that she had come to the launch with "mixed feelings".

"On one hand I have hope when I hear 'Global Campaign', but at the same time, I am also sad and ashamed, on behalf of all adults, to learn that after two decades and a half, and only 10 years away from the deadline to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), children are not sufficiently mainstreamed in the response to HIV/AIDS," she said.

The MDGs include a 50 percent reduction in poverty and hunger; universal primary education; reduction of child mortality by two-thirds; cutbacks in maternal mortality by three-quarters; the promotion of gender equality; and the reversal of the spread of HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, all by 2015.

Peter McDermott, chief of UNICEF's HIV/AIDS section, explained that the new campaign aims to unite the efforts of all those fighting AIDS to meet children's needs in four key areas.

To prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV, the campaign seeks to expand services to 80 percent of women in need by 2010, up from the current 10 percent.

By providing pediatric drug treatment, the campaign seeks to cut in half the number of children who are infected at birth and die each year before reaching the age of one year -- currently about 500,000.

And by preventing new infections among adolescents and young people, it hopes to reduce by 25 percent the number of children between the ages of four and 15 infected annually by 2010.

McDermott also said that the campaign would try to break down stigmas and discrimination surrounding HIV/AIDS globally.

He noted that there has been denial in many Islamic countries about the problem of HIV/AIDS. Following the holy month of Ramadan, the campaign will be launched at an Islamic conference in Rabat, Morocco, showing that children and HIV/AIDS are also on the Islamic agenda.

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said at the launch of the campaign that the world must address what he called "one of the cruellest tragedies of our time".

"As we know," he said, "in the world of AIDS, silence is death."

Every day, there are nearly 1,800 new HIV infections in children under 15, mostly from mother-to-child transmission. Yet less than 10 percent of pregnant women are offered drugs to stop the spread of HIV to their infants.

"In some countries where HIV/AIDS was most prevalent, life expectancy had plummeted from the mid-60s to the low 30s, so that turning 18 could mean reaching middle age," Veneman added.

"We need to break down the stigmas around AIDS" to improve the quality of life for the people that have to live with it, she said.

Bill Roedy, president of MTV Networks International, acknowledged that the media has also not done enough to fight this epidemic.

"The media have the tremendous ability to help fight the epidemic -- not only in increasing awareness and prevention, but also in removing the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS," he said.

There are roughly 660,000 children under the age of 15 who need antiretroviral treatment. One widely available medicine, cotrimoxazole, could save the lives of at least half the four million children who are diagnosed with HIV or born to HIV-positive mothers, but not yet diagnosed positive themselves.

The drug just costs three cents per child per day, but only one percent of children who could benefit from cotrimoxazole have access to the drug.

This week, Ireland became the first country in the world to pledge that at least 20 percent of its overseas aid budget on HIV/AIDS will focus specifically on children. Veneman called Ireland "an example for other governments".

UNICEF and Clear Channel Outdoor also unveiled the first ever global outdoor advertising campaign to raise awareness of the impact of HIV/AIDS on children.

The posters will be visible in 50 countries. They depict a girl's portrait of her family with two graves and herself, with the words "Mommy, Daddy, Me".

"The simplicity of the design and the message was decisive to choose this design for the poster campaign," explained Goodwill Ambassador Sir Roger Moore.

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+UNICEF (http://www.unicef.org/uniteforchildren/index.html)

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