Aids has surpassed armed conflict as the number one killer in eastern and southern Africa, where the disease claimed 1.4 million lives last year alone, the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) said yesterday in its annual report.
"We are confronting a deadly virus that has ripped apart the social fabric of societies across Africa, creating a generation of orphans who face an uncertain and frightening future," UNICEF's deputy executive director, Mr Stephen Lewis, said during the launch of the report in Nairobi.
The pandemic has left six million children orphaned in eastern and southern Africa, where more than 70 per cent of the world's AIDS orphans live. The report, Progress of Nations, warns that AIDS is likely to swell infant mortality rates by 75 per cent and under-five mortality by 65 per cent in Africa by 2010.
In Botswana, for example, AIDS will be responsible for 64 per cent of the deaths of children under the age of five by next year. In South Africa and Zimbabwe, AIDS is projected to account for a doubling of child mortality, Mr Lewis added.
He urged African governments to break the "conspiracy of silence" surrounding AIDS and outlaw discrimination against those affected by the disease.
The report calls for outright debt cancellation for some of the world's poorest countries.
"It is morally indefensible, it is morally unconscionable, it is repugnant, odious, offensive and ugly that the West is prepared to spend upwards of $40 billion to fight war in the Balkans, and then to engage in the economic restoration of Kosovo, and less than 1 per cent of that to save the lives of tens of millions of children, women and men in Africa," Mr Lewis said.
"Patience has run dry for UNICEF as it has run dry in many other United Nations agencies," he added.
A child in the developing world is born bearing an average debt obligation of $417. Sub-Saharan Africa spends more on servicing its $200 billion debt than on the health and education of its 306 million children, according to the report.
The agency also said polio cases had dropped by 86 per cent, but wars and persistent poverty were impeding a final, tantalising success by 2000.