Do you know, 2.9 million people died of AIDS in 2006! And an estimated 39.5 million people are now living with HIV worldwide?

Shockingly, AIDS kills some 6,000 people each day in Africa alone?! It is a figure more than what wars, famines and floods can do!

• Millions of children are orphans; many more live with HIV or Aids. More than 15 million, under-18 children have been orphaned across the world as a result of AIDS.

• More than 12 million of these children live in Sub-Saharan Africa! Currently estimated, 9% of all children have lost at least one parent to AIDS.

• During 2005 alone, an estimated 2 million adults and children died as a result of AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa.

• Over 1.25 million children in a country are orphans. 210,000 of them have been orphaned due to Aids. 27,000 of these orphans are HIV infected, according to the National Commission on Aids, RWANDA.

What is leading to this overwhelming pediatric AIDS in Africa?

Traditional ceremonies and practices!

As researchers spend more time studying Africa’s overwhelming pediatric AIDS problem, they are finding that the routes of transmission may be different than in the industrialized countries, and the strategies for preventing the disease’s spread must be adapted to local realities.

• In remote African villages, there are traditional birth and naming ceremony of a newborn, named ‘Innocents’, customs of which require a new mother - even if she is HIV positive - to nurse the little ones!

• Even more potentially hazardous ceremonies - like ‘Sacrification’ or ethnic identification - which require cutting or ritual healing. In this ritual, blades are used in sequence again and again! The ritual is often done with unsterilized blades!

• Unlike developed countries, where the only risk factor for children is that they can get HIV from their mother at birth, here a host of traditional ceremonies and practices is making the transmission route “unique” in Africa - dangers that have, up to now, been ignored.

The consequences

• With HIV infections becoming increasingly common among the adult population of the region, the HIV-associated mortality’s brunt is expected to occur within this very decade!

• And as a result, millions of children will lose parents to AIDS. And, it is only by 2010, there will be around 15.7 million AIDS orphans in Sub-Saharan Africa, as been predicted.

Marcel Manny Lobe, director of the new International Reference and Research Center for H.I.V.-AIDS in Yaounde said,

If we are only biology, biology, biology, then we are only doing half of our mission.

We need also to do the sociology and anthropology and then make biological interventions.