AIDS orphans: Africa's lost generation.

• Author: Sachs, Aaron
• Position: AIDS claims the lives of several parents in Africa

"There have been as many plagues as wars in history," observes the narrator of Albert Camus' novel, The Plague, "yet always plagues and wars takc people equally by surprise."

Unfortunately, the AIDS pandemic has affirmed yet again the tragedy of Camus' insight into human denial. A decade after the outbreak of AIDS, the disease is still taking us by surprise. To many near-sighted policymakers in the developed world, it remains simply another health problem, and a relatively containable one at that. But in Central and East Africa, the disease is crippling entire townships, threatening not only people's health, but their most fundamental social structures. In the midst of Africa's bleak war with the disease, AIDS' newest and perhaps most neglected victims are the orphaned children it leaves in its wake.

Already, more than two million HIV-negative children from the region have lost at least their mother to AIDS. Of course, somc infants are dying of AIDS, but many are born before their mother contracts HIV, and only about 30 percent of the children born to HIV-positive mothers actually inherit the virus. Surviving orphans try to seek out relatives or friends on whom they can depend, but these days more and more are ending up on their own, scrambling to meet their basic physical and psychological needs. Set adrift in countries that regularly have trouble just feeding their populations, some AIDS orphans cannot eat even when food is available. Lenina, a 9-year-old orphan from Tanzania who watched as her parents gradually withered and died of AIDS, was lucky enough to be taken in by her grandmother, but she now spends most of her days just sitting under a tree.

As the rising number of orphans attests, AIDS has truly become a family disease in Central and East Africa, a perception rarely attributed to AIDS in other parts of the world, where it is either relatively uncommon or is highly concentrated among intravenous drug users and homosexuals. In Africa, however, the virus is almost always passed heterosexualy and often between husbands and wives. Almost every AIDS victim in Africa, then, is likely to leave behind severl dependents. And, according to the most recent data from the World Health Organization (WHO), more than seven million African adults are alreade HIV-positive and face almost certain death. After only two years' time between 1989 and 1991, in four districts of Uganda studied by Susan Hunter, a UNICEF consultant, the proportion of...