HIV and AIDS

Follow this link to The Rights Site to hear about a boy and his three brothers who were orphaned because of AIDS.

Click here to find out about children in Mozambique who put on plays to teach other children about HIV and AIDS.

Follow this link to learn about kids in Zambia who have started an AIDS Awareness Club.

Imagine if there were hardly any parents in your neighborhood. What would it be like? Who would take care of the children? Well, this is what it's like in Africa due to HIV and AIDS.

HIV stands for Human Immunodeficiency Virus. AIDS stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. When you get HIV, your immune system starts breaking down. Your immune system helps you fight off sicknesses. Sometimes when you have HIV it turns into AIDS, but not always. There is no cure for AIDS.

Because of HIV/AIDS, there are 13 million orphans in Africa.
In Africa, 22.5 million people now have HIV.
Everyday, 1,600 children in the world die from HIV or AIDS.
In the United Kingdom, one person is infected with HIV every six hours.

AIDS often effects children even if they don't have the disease themselves. When parents die of AIDS, their children become orphans. While the parents are sick, the children often have to stay home and take care of them. Sometimes, children need to work to make up for the money that is lost because their sick parents can't work. So these children don't have time to go to school and get an education. This is a bad cycle, because without an education these children will grow up in poverty without knowing enough about how not to get HIV themselves.

You can't tell that someone has HIV or AIDS just by looking at them. There are medicines you can take when you have HIV that will slow down the disease and help you stay healthier longer so it doesn't turn into AIDS. In Africa, however, there is not enough money, medicine, or clinics to help all the people that have AIDS. A lot of the people there don't even know they had HIV until it turns into AIDS and they are really sick.

If the world doesn't come together to help stop HIV and AIDS in Africa, soon we will be missing whole generations of people around the world because of this disease.

Citations

Websites

Global Movement for Children. "Fight AIDS/HIV." 2002-2003. <http://www.gmfc.org/index.html> (February, 2004).

UNICEF. "The Rights Site." <http://www.therightssite.org.uk/html/issues_haa.htm> (February, 2004).

Images

Images of medicine shelf and arrows from "Microsoft Office Online" <http://office.microsoft.com/clipart/default.aspx?cag=1> Images free for non-profit and personal use. (October-February, 2003-2004).