Miami Herald - Wednesday, December 23, 1992
Herald Staff

The vast majority of the orphans will be blacks and Hispanics, said the study, reported in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

In Dade County, the trend would put at least 4,100 children, probably more, onto the rolls of an already overloaded foster care system, said Douglas Feldman, an AIDS epidemiologist at the University of Miami.

"This is very important because what we need to do is start working on this now, making sure that whatever we need to do over the next eight years for these additional AIDS orphans will be in place," Feldman said. "It should be developed right now."

But he is not optimistic.

"My guess will be that what will probably happen is that we'll discover we have these 4,100 new AIDS orphans, and there'll be no funding to take care of their needs," he said.

In Broward, 81 women died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1991. This year, the number had grown to 101 as of Friday.

The number of mothers with AIDS is visibly increasing, said Dean Egly, vice president of the Poverello Center, a food bank for people with the AIDS virus.

"I think it's going to be a bad problem," Egly said. "The grandmothers have to take over the children."

Lisa Conti, acting AIDS surveillance administrator for Florida, said she expected recommendations on how to plan for the huge increase in AIDS orphans in South Florida to emerge from the Red Ribbon Panel, an AIDS policy group appointed by the governor.

In Florida, 16 percent of all AIDS cases recorded are among women, compared to 11 percent nationwide, Conti noted. Infection with the AIDS virus, HIV, has been increasing rapidly among child-bearing women in Dade, from one in 222 women giving birth in 1988 to one in 182 last year, she said.

The ever-widening death toll from AIDS already rivals that of cancer and automobile accidents when it comes to leaving children motherless, and a "social catastrophe" looms unless something is done, the City University of New York report said.

Thirteen percent of the 21,000 children under age 13 who became parentless last year and 9 percent of the 28,000 of those ages 13 to 17 were newly orphaned because of AIDS, researchers estimated.

Those proportions will rise to 30 percent and 22 percent, respectively, by 2000, the researchers reported.

"Even if we were able to stop all new infections tomorrow, through some magic wand, almost all the children we're projecting to be orphans would still be orphaned," said the chief author, David Michaels, an associate professor at City University of New York Medical School.

Because no data on U.S. orphans exist, the authors said they used related statistics to develop a mathematical model for estimating and projecting the number of AIDS orphans. "It's amazing. . . . We do not keep track of children in the United States who lose their parents," Michaels said.

The researchers used statistics on the number of children born to women overall, the death rates among women from all causes and the rates of AIDS infection and deaths to generate their findings.

They estimated that 18,500 children and adolescents who are not infected with the AIDS virus have already been orphaned by the disease. By 1996, the number is expected to rise to 45,600 and to 82,000 by the turn of the century, they wrote.

Most orphans will be poor and black or Hispanic, living in communities least equipped to care for them, the authors said.

For their study, they defined orphans as youngsters whose mothers die of AIDS or of ailments related to AIDS-virus infections.

The possible presence of a male parent was not considered. Most mothers with AIDS are sexual partners of infected men or users of intravenous drugs, the researchers said. Men as sole care-givers were not considered. No statistics exist on how many there are, Michaels said.

Herald staff writers Linda Roach Monroe and Donna Leinwand contributed to this report.

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