Estimated worldwide HIV infections: 57 569 638 at 12.30pm on June 2
Fees bar African Aids orphans from schools: School fees are preventing vast numbers of Aids orphans from getting an education and improving their future prospects, a United Nations official said on Tuesday.
While some African countries have outlawed fees, they typically resurface in other forms such as registration charges, limits on eligibility for subsidies and bills for books or uniforms, said Stephen Lewis, the UN special envoy for Aids in Africa.
The Convention on the Rights of the Child, which took effect in 1990, requires that children get a free primary education. It has been ratified by all but two of the 191 UN members — Somalia and the United States.
Yet ‘everywhere my colleagues and I visited, people talked of school fees as a bar to enrolment”.
Lewis said it was also clear that governments have no plans in place to deal with an expected ‘onslaught of abandoned, rootless, bewildered and despairing kids of all ages”.
The number of Aids orphans under the age of 18 around the world is expected to soar to 25-million by 2010, with the vast majority living in Africa, according to UN figures.
Source: http://www.alertnet.org/
Estimated worldwide HIV infections: 57 670 181 at noon on June 9
Prevention: Availability of HIV treatment could shift attitudes about the threat of HIV/Aids in the developing world, potentially resulting in increased risk behaviour and the continued global expansion of the Aids pandemic.
This was is according to a report released this week by the Global HIV-Prevention Working Group calling for a comprehensive response to the pandemic by integrating HIV-prevention interventions into treatment programmes.
The group of 50 Aids experts, convened by the Bill and Melinda Gates and Kaiser foundations, recommends that HIV-prevention strategies and messages be adapted to stress the importance of continued risk reduction.
The report cites countries where treatment access, expanded without focusing on prevention strategies, leads to increased new infections and risk behaviour.
Its specific recommendations include: promoting HIV testing (only 10 % of HIV-positive people in developing countries are aware of their infection); increasing access to proven HIV-prevention interventions; and developing sustainable strategies for HIV-positive people.
The group also joined UNAids in stressing the need for a major increase globally in funding treatment, prevention, and research programmes.
Source: www.kff.org