1 MILLION CHILDREN HAVE AIDS, HIV, U.N. REPORTS.

Byline: Associated Press 

AIDS and the AIDS virus afflict 1 million children around the world, and an additional 3 million children have already died of the disease, a new U.N. report said Friday.

Release of the study - billed as the first comprehensive look at how AIDS and HIV affect children - comes just two days before the start of the 11th International Conference on AIDS in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Of 1 million children with AIDS or HIV, about 65 percent live in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the survey, which says that AIDS in children progresses faster than in adults, meaning infected children tend to die sooner.

The figures were compiled by the Francois-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard University School of Public Health, and released by UNAIDS, a U.N. program to combat the disease.

The center calculated that 25 percent of children who have died of AIDS were infected by their mothers; 85 percent of those children lived in sub-Saharan Africa.

Last year, about 1,400 children were born every day with the HIV infection, for an annual total of about 500,000. Fifty-seven percent were in sub-Saharan Africa, 30 percent in Southeast Asia, 2 percent in Latin America and 1 percent in the Caribbean, the report found.

Overall, the number of people suffering from AIDS remains at 1.4 million, approximately 19 percent higher than the figure as of June 30, 1995, the report said. The number does not include people with HIV who have not developed AIDS.

Last year about 1.3 million people, including 300,000 children and 400,000 women, died of AIDS.

The most staggering data were found in the cumulative total: at least 5.8 million deaths, 7.7 million AIDS cases and almost 28 million HIV infections since AIDS was recognized in 1981 and HIV in 1983.

Although the report states that 3 million children have died from AIDS, it also referred to a World Health Organization statistic of 1.3 million children dying from the disease. Officials from WHO, also a U.N. agency, were unable to explain the discrepancy.

As of June 30, nearly 22 million people were living with HIV or AIDS. Of these, 21 million are adults and the rest are children.

The prevalence of AIDS and HIV among children, the survey concluded, is almost 35 percent higher in the developing world than in the industrialized world. One reason is that drugs blocking the infection are expensive and difficult to deliver in the developing world, the report said.

The report also found that one in every three children orphaned by HIV/AIDS is younger than 5.

This year's international AIDS conference will begin Sunday.