Today is World AIDS Day, a time to remember that HIV/AIDS continues to shatter lives, families, and communities, even as other pandemics take hold. Since this is a parenting blog, I’m once again sharing how HIV/AIDS has impacted children and parents around the world.
Here are the latest sobering worldwide statistics about parents and children of all orientations and identities. According to UNICEF (my bold):
Of the estimated 38.4 million people living with HIV worldwide in 2021, 2.73 million were children aged 0–19. Each day in 2021, approximately 850 children became infected with HIV and approximately 301 children died from AIDS related causes, mostly because of inadequate access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services.
As of 2021, roughly 14.9 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 650,000 people who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2021, 110,000 (or approximately 17 per cent) of them were children under 20 years of age….
About 75 per cent of these preventable deaths occurred among children under 10 years old. The number of annual AIDS-related deaths among children has declined by 75 per cent since its peak in 2002, while the number of annual AIDS-related deaths among those aged 10–19 has only decreased by 21 per cent since 2002.
In 2021, 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 1.02 million…. One bright spot on the global horizon is the rapid decline of approximately 52 per cent in new HIV infections among children aged 0–9 since 2010 due to stepped-up efforts to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV. However, the number of new HIV infections among adolescents (aged 10–19) has declined at a slower rate of about 40 per cent.
In 2021, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for approximately … 88 per cent of children and adolescents living with HIV worldwide. The spread of HIV in sub-Saharan Africa is mostly through heterosexual relationships, both in the context of transactional and commercial sex and in longer-term relationships, including marriage.
(I’ve left out the confidence bounds on the numbers for ease of reading; please visit the UNICEF site for full data.)
In presenting this data, I in no way mean to ignore or lessen the impact of HIV/AIDS in other populations, particularly men who have sex with men. Others with far more knowledge and experience than I are writing about that for our community today, however; fellow blogger and journalist Mark King’s “Once, When We Were Heroes” is a piece I particularly appreciate (along with the rest of his blog).
The past few years have put all people on alert about a pandemic. May we not forget to tend to those still impacted by another pandemic that still lingers. As we observe World AIDS Day today, then, let us also recommit to demanding that our elected officials to conduct science-based policymaking, guided by a sense of humanity, international cooperation, and social justice.