Yep

[I AM ME]

November 26, 2003

GENEVA, SWITZERLAND - AIDS will orphan millions more of African children in the next seven years, warns a report issued Wednesday by UNICEF. The UN report "Africa's Orphaned Generations" predicts that by 2010, more than one in five children will by orphaned in the hardest hit counries of Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe.

AIDS has already orphaned more than 11 million African children, half of whom are between the ages of 10 and 14. By 2010, that number is expected to rise to about 20 million. The care for about 90 per cent of these orphans is left to extended families. In most cases, the community is not equipped to care fully for these children who are forced to leave school and are subjected to the worst forms of child labour.

If anything, AIDS is the most threatening weapon of mass destruction in the world today. Its damage is real, its spread is real, its potential for catastrophic proportions (if we haven’t reached them already) is real.

Your average North American will go on about why “those Africans” don’t just abstain from sex altogether or why they don’t know any better. Given that the level of AIDS awareness and education in Africa is slim to none, one has to wonder why the UK, the USA, and Russia are in the top 15 of the world’s effected nations considering that they do have ample AIDS education, even condom programs and needle exchanges in some cases.

AIDS preys upon everyone. The lame belief amongst many that it’s a “gay” disease is not only ignorant but also extremely helpful to the spread of the disease. What are the current statistics between gays that are infected as opposed to heterosexuals? You might be very surprised to discover the answer.

If there needs to be a war on anything, it should be hunger and AIDS. More people die every year because they have nothing to eat than any other cause. AIDS poses a massive threat in that the numbers of infected people could quite easily keep growing as they did this year. At what point does it become a truly recognized crisis? If the War On Hunger is any indication, it may take the deaths of millions of people to make it an alarming issue that begins to seep into the lives of the disinterested many. I suppose the question is, why isn’t it already considered an alarming issue?

If you would like to read more about the problem, you can visit www.unicef.org/emerg/southernafrica/index.html.

amen to that