Today is World AIDS Day, a time to remember that even as another pandemic is in the headlines, HIV/AIDS continues to shatter lives, families, and communities around the world. I’m therefore once again sharing some information about children and parents with HIV/AIDS.
Here are the latest sobering worldwide statistics about parents and children of all orientations and identities. According to UNICEF (my bold):
Of the estimated 38.0 million people living with HIV worldwide in 2020, 2.78 million were children aged 0-19. Each day in 2020, approximately 850 children became infected with HIV and approximately 330 children died from AIDS related causes, mostly because of inadequate access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services.
As of 2020, roughly 15.4 million children under the age of 18 had lost one or both parents to AIDS-related causes. Millions more have been affected by the epidemic, through a heightened risk of poverty, homelessness, school dropout, discrimination and loss of opportunities, as well as COVID-19. These hardships include prolonged illness and death.
Of the estimated 680,000 people who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2020, 120,000 (or approximately 18 per cent) of them were children under 20 years of age…. About 72 per cent of these preventable deaths occurred among children under 10 years old.
In 2020, around 160,000 children aged 0-9 were newly infected with HIV, bringing the total number of children aged 0-9 living with HIV to 1.03 million. Nearly 90 per cent of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa.
UNICEF notes, too, that the “vast majority” of AIDS-related deaths in children under 15 globally “were preventable, either through antibiotic treatment of opportunistic infections and/or through antiretroviral treatment.” On a slightly more positive note, “With progress in expanding access to early infant HIV-testing services and antiretroviral treatment for children, we are seeing these children surviving and aging out of childhood into adolescence…. However, the gains that were made in the early 2000s have begun to plateau in recent years.” Additionally, while annual AIDS-related deaths among children have declined by 74 percent since the peak in 2003, “the number of annual AIDS-related deaths among those aged 10-19 has only decreased by 10 per cent.”
It’s not a matter of choosing to fight one pandemic over the other, though. Our work to address these diseases must go hand in hand. Perhaps some of the lessons learned from dealing with one pandemic can even help us address others. This is why epidemiologists are important and why we must listen to them as well as to people in the communities hardest hit by any pandemic. As we observe World AIDS Day today, then, let us also recommit to demanding that our elected officials conduct science-based policymaking, guided by a sense of humanity, international cooperation, and social justice.