The AIDS epidemic has devastated the lives of children across Africa leaving eight million as orphans and crushing rates of child survival, the United Nations children's agency, UNICEF, said yesterday. The virus has overtaken war as the number one killer in eastern and southern Africa.
Polio cases have dropped by 86 per cent, but wars and persistent poverty were impeding a final, tantalising success by 2000, the agency said.
UNICEF's deputy executive director, Mr Stephen Lewis, urged African leaders to break a "conspiracy of silence" to make AIDS eradication an obsession and attacked a "massive distortion of priorities" by the West which spent on AIDS hardly one per cent of the $40 billion the Balkan war cost.
A staggering 48 per cent of the world's HIV/AIDS cases are in eastern and southern Africa, the agency said at the African launch in Nairobi of its annual Progress of Nations report.
Mr Lewis, told reporters that the devastation the virus had reaped across Africa was a "modern incarnation of Dante's inferno".
"Never has Africa faced such a plague," he said. "One wonders how the continent will cope."
Mr Lewis said AIDS had killed 1.4 million people in the region in 1998 and the spread of the epidemic was accelerating. By the end of next year, another two million children would be orphaned and the numbers would continue to rise exponentially.
Mother-to-child transmission of the HIV virus during pregnancy or through breast feeding has eroded all the hard-won infant and child survival gains of the last 20 years, Mr Lewis said.
If the spread of the virus is not contained, AIDS could increase under-five mortality by more than 100 per cent in those regions worst affected by the disease.
But there are some glimmers of hope. A new drug, nevirapine, still under trial in Uganda, could cut mother-to-child transmission rates by up to 50 per cent - at a cost of just $4 for the full treatment. Nevertheless, UNICEF said education rather than new treatments was still the only effective approach.
Mr Lewis urged African leaders to take the lead in breaking the "conspiracy of silence" surrounding the disease in a continent where myth and ignorance have fuelled its spread. "The disease must become an obsession among the leadership," he said. "A leader who fails to speak out against HIV/AIDS fails the people of his nation."
Western governments had failed to respond to the crisis. "It is morally indefensible, morally unconscionable, that the West is prepared to spend upwards of $40 billion to fight a war in the Balkans and less than one per cent of that to save the lives of tens of millions of women and children in Africa," Mr Lewis said.
On polio, the UNICEF Ireland executive director, Ms Maura Quinn, said: "We have made great strides forward. We are on the threshold of completely eradicating polio and follow smallpox, the first disease ever eradicated, into the annals of history."
UNICEF's executive director, Ms Carol Bellamy, said: "But ongoing civil conflicts in places like Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo are threatening the campaign against polio just as we approach the finish line."
Nevertheless, the number of worldwide polio cases has dropped by 86 per cent, from 35,000 to 5,000 since the World Health Organisation launched immunisation campaigns in 1988, now followed up by UNICEF and other organisations, including the US Centre for Disease Control.
"Health workers have trekked through deserts and waded waisthigh through water to deliver oral polio vaccines," Ms Bellamy said in the report.
Others have delivered the heat-sensitive vaccine by camel in southern Sudan, by bicycle and motorbike in India and by boat in Cambodia and Vietnam.
But HIV/AIDS has galloped through developing nations, infecting 16,000 people daily and creating a soaring orphan population of 10 million children.
With the world's population expected to reach six billion later this year, the report said the new generation had less than one chance in 10 of being born into prosperity.
A child in the developing world is also born bearing an average debt obligation of $417, with the poorest nations in Africa spending more servicing a $200 billion debt than they spend on health and education of 306 million children.