Children, HIV & AIDS

Vast numbers of children across the world become infected with HIV every year. Without treatment, thousands die as a result of AIDS. In addition, millions more children who are not infected with HIV are indirectly affected by the epidemic, as a result of the death and suffering that AIDS causes in their families and their communities.

Despite the severity of this situation, many people still think of AIDS as something that affects adults. Some people occasionally think of ‘AIDS babies’, and children who have lost one or both of their parents to AIDS – AIDS orphans – are sometimes in the media. But since HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, is commonly transmitted through sex or drug use, people don’t really think of it affecting children. It does, though – and millions of children around the world continue to have their lives damaged by HIV.

The number of infected children

The most direct way for HIV to affect a child is when they themselves are infected. As the facts below demonstrate, staggering numbers of children are affected in this way:

• At the end of 2007, there were 2.5 million children living with HIV around the world.¹
• 420,000 children became newly infected with HIV in 2007.²
• Of the 2.1 million people who died of AIDS during 2007, more than one in seven were children. Every hour, around forty children die as a result of AIDS.³

International law defines a child as being a person aged below 18 years, but the statistics above (taken from UNAIDS, one of the largest international AIDS organisations) define children as people under the age of 15. Most other international AIDS organisations use this definition as well, and since this page is based on AIDS data, we also use the word ‘child’ to refer to a person aged below 15 years.

Children at the Raphael Centre, South Africa

Most children living with HIV ­– around 9 out of 10 – live in Sub-Saharan Africa, the region of the world where AIDS has taken its greatest toll. Large numbers of children with HIV also live in the Caribbean, Latin America and South/South East Asia.⁴ Around 90% of all children living with HIV acquired the infection from their mothers during pregnancy, birth or breastfeeding.⁵ Many countries that had previously seen child-survival rates rise, as a result of improved healthcare, are now seeing these rates fall again. In Botswana and Zimbabwe, for instance, child mortality rates have nearly doubled since 1990.⁶

In Africa, studies suggest that one in three newborns infected with HIV die before the age of one, over half die before reaching their second birthday, and most are dead before they are five years old.⁷ Conversely, in developed countries, preventive measures ensure that the transmission of HIV from mother to child is relatively rare, and in those cases where it does occur, a range of treatment options means that the child can survive – often into adulthood. This shows that with funding, trained staff and resources, the infections and deaths of many children in lower-income countries might easily be avoided.