Pediatric AIDS now considered a global threat; millions expected to become orphans.

Pediatric AIDS now considered a global threat Millions expected to become orphans

Alarming projections by the World Health Organization (WHO) show that the acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) will become the number of killer of children in sub -Saharan Africa during the 1990s, making pediatric AIDS a major global threat. By the end of 1992 alone, almost a million infants born there will be infected by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV).

While this region of Africa will be hardest-hit, AIDS will also become a global pediatric killer elsewhere, based on the fast spread of HIV among heterosexuals in Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and the United States.

Based on a recent WHO study of the AIDS pandemic, it is estimated that by the year 2000, 10 million infants and children globally will have been infected with HIV and most will have died at AIDS.

Equally chilling is the WHO forecast of an additional 10 million uninfected children under the age of 10 who will be orphaned by the end of this decade due to the health of their parents from AIDS.

"We can't underestimate the tragic impact of AIDS on these families", said Dr. Michael H. Merson, Director of WHO's Global Programme on AIDS, in a recent interview. "We're already dealing with a terrible situation with AIDS in Africa. There are some basic care and social issued involved because this disease affects the entire community. Who's going to assume responsibility for taking care of these abandoned children?"

The majority of projected cases of pediatric AIDS and uninfected orphans will be found not only in poor, urban areas of sub-Saharan Africa, but also increasingly in rural communities as well. Based on WHO epidemiological reports confirming a continued spread of HIV infection among heterosexuals in the developing world, the international agency now estimates that 1 in 40 adult men and women in sub-Saharan Africa has contracted HIV, compared with earlier estimates of 1 in 50.

What this may lead to is a tripling of the adult mortality rate in the urban sub-Saharan region and a child mortality rate as high as 50 per cent during the next decade. AIDS threatens to wipe out the significant gains made in child survival in the 1980s, the WHO reports suggest, and may lower life expectancy at birth in many sub-Saharan cities by six years, based on several HIV infection/AIDS models.

While the population growth for cities in this region is expected to remain positive over this period, it may become negative beyond the year 2000 if the current trends hold.

"The challenge to health, to social services, and indeed to the whole of society, is enormous", said Dr. Hiroshi Nakajima, Director-General of WHO, referring to the surge in global pediatric AIDS cases. "As a result of child survival programmes, we have seen major reductions in child mortality. Now, because of AIDS, we fear this progress will be reversed."