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 from UNICEF (my bold):
Of the estimated 40.0 million people living with HIV worldwide in 2023, 2.38 million were children aged 0-19. Each day in 2023, approximately 685 children became infected with HIV and approximately 250 children died from AIDS related causes, mostly due to inadequate access to HIV prevention, care and treatment services.
As of 2023, roughly 14.1 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 630,000 people who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 2023, 90,000 (or approximately 14 per cent) of them were children under 20 years of age….
About 73 per cent of these preventable deaths occurred among children under 10 years old. The number of annual AIDS-related deaths among children aged 0-14 years has declined by about 80 per cent since its peak in 2002, while the number of annual AIDS-related deaths among those aged 15-19 has only decreased by 8 per cent since 2002.
In 2023, around 120,000 children aged 0-14 were newly infected with HIV, bringing the total number of children aged 0-14 living with HIV to 1,370,000. Nearly 87 per cent of these children live in sub-Saharan Africa. One bright spot on the global horizon is the rapid decline of approximately 62 per cent in new HIV infections among children aged 0-14 [original reads “0-914,” an obvious typo. —Ed.] 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 15-19) has declined at a slower rate of about 48 per cent.
In 2023, sub-Saharan Africa accounted for approximately 65 per cent of people of all ages living with HIV and 84 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. Current evidence in southern Africa has identified sexual relationships between adolescent girls or young women and older men as a common HIV transmission route.
(I’ve left out the confidence bounds on the numbers for ease of reading; please visit the UNICEF site for full data.)
If you’d like to know more about HIV/AIDS in children and how various organizations are working to end it, please visit (among other sites):
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 (and on many other days), however; fellow blogger and journalist Mark King’s 2022 piece, “Once, When We Were Heroes” remains a piece I particularly appreciate; his “When Survival Ends,” posted last week, is also a moving, worthwhile read.
If you are seeking LGBTQ-inclusive children’s books about AIDS and people with AIDS, please see my roundup from last year ) to which I would add this year’s Glenn Burke, Game Changer). Alysia Abbott’s Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father is also a moving memoir (for adults) about being raised in 1970s and 80s San Francisco by a single gay father, who died of AIDS-related complications in 1992.
The past few years have put all people on alert about a different pandemic. May we not forget, however, to tend to those still impacted by the AIDS pandemic. As we observe World AIDS Day today, 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, on AIDS and other matters.
