Aids robs 15m children of parents: UN report

With HIV infection rates rising and the incurable disease taking 10 years to kill without treatment, an estimated 18.4 million children will have lost at least one parent by 2010, according to the Unicef report released at the 15th International AIDS Conference.

"It is a tidal wave of children who have lost one or more of their parents," Carol Bellamy, executive director of Unicef, the United Nations children's agency, told Reuters.

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"Fifteen million globally, close to 12 million in sub-Saharan Africa alone," she said. "It has the possibility of destabilizing societies quite dramatically."

Without the Aids epidemic, which has already killed 20 million people worldwide and infected 38 million, the numbers of orphans would be falling because of better health care and nutrition. Aids has reversed the trend.

Much of the Aids meeting that began Sunday has been focused on money, improving universal access to life-prolonging drugs and wrangling over whether abstinence or condoms is the best way to prevent new infections.

But children's activists argue that the plight of orphans and vulnerable children is not getting the attention it deserves within the overall Aids effort.

Forgotten By Global Community

"In some ways orphans are one of the orphaned issues at this conference," said Dr Joanne Carter, legislative director of Results, an international anti-hunger and anti-poverty group.

"It's clear that what is left in the wake of the Aids pandemic is these kids. These kids are the futures of their society and they have been largely forgotten by the global community," she added. US Congresswoman Barbara Lee, a Democrat from California and the only member of Congress at the week-long meeting, described the orphan crisis as "mind-boggling."

In Asia, where the Aids epidemic began relatively recently and HIV prevalence is still low, the number of orphans has dropped since 1990. But if HIV/Aids expands, as many experts fear it will, so too will the number of orphans.