PRESS CONFERENCE BY UNICEF EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR ON HIV/AIDS

[thiru balasubramaniam <thiru@cptech.org>]

http://www.un.org/News/briefings/docs/1999/19990920.bellamy.html

>From a UN press briefing given by Carol Bellamy, the UNICEF Executive
Director


19990920 

[Snip]

Carol Bellamy, the Executive Director of the United Nations Children's
Fund (UNICEF), told correspondents at a Headquarters press
conference that the "quite extraordinary" spread of HIV/AIDS in
sub-Saharan Africa risks wiping out the gains made in children's health
in the last two decades. 

Speaking the week after she addressed the eleventh international
conference on AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Diseases (STDs) in Lusaka,
Zambia, Ms. Bellamy said 33.5 million people worldwide were now living
with AIDS; half of all newly- infected people were in the 10-25 age
group; 8,500 children every day were orphaned by the disease -- a rate
of six per minute; and in the case of Uganda, for example, 11 per cent
of all children in the country were now AIDS orphans. 

In her Lusaka speech, Ms. Bellamy had observed that while 200,000
Africans died in armed conflicts during 1998, 2 million had died of AIDS
in the same year. The AIDS pandemic was "the world's most terrible
undeclared war" and it had turned sub- Saharan Africa into "a killing
field". 

[Snip]

In response to another question about the general effectiveness of the
United Nations, Ms. Bellamy said there remained three great challenges
for the future: poverty, war and HIV/AIDS, and she said that -- whatever
the political problems facing it -- the United Nations had achieved some
"very significant successes" in its development work. 

* *** *  

-- 
Thiru Balasubramaniam
thiru@cptech.org
http://www.cptech.org/thiru