Global Campaign to Help Child Aids Victims

Unicef today said it was a "disgrace" that more than 95% of children with Aids around the world were not receiving any treatment.

The UN charity, launching a global campaign to highlight the disease's impact on children, said 1,800 were infected with the virus every day.

It described children as the "missing face" of Aids, overlooked by national and global policies.

Millions of children have been orphaned or otherwise affected by the virus, but less than 10% received support, the charity said as it launched the Unite for Children, Unite Against Aids campaign.

"Nearly 25 years into the pandemic, help is reaching less than 10% of the children affected by HIV/Aids, leaving too many children to grow up alone, grow up too fast or not grow up at all," the UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, said. "Simply put, Aids is wreaking havoc on childhood."

Unicef said that, every minute, a child dies of an Aids-related illness, a child becomes infected with HIV, and four people aged between 15 and 24 become infected.

The charity predicted that 18 million children in sub-Saharan Africa could be orphaned by Aids by the end of 2010.

An estimated 15 million children have lost at least one parent to the virus, and Aids orphans were often left without access to schooling, healthcare and other basic support and prevention services.

It warned that the former communist countries of eastern Europe and Central Asia faced the fastest-growing rise in Aids infections in the world. More than three quarters of the 1.4m people affected in these areas were under 30, including increasing numbers of children.

"In the past quarter of a century, HIV/Aids has claimed the lives of more than 20 million people and lowered life expectancy in the hardest-hit countries by as much as 30 years," Ann Veneman, the executive director of Unicef, said.

"A whole generation has never known a world free of HIV and Aids, yet the magnitude of the problem dwarfs the scale of the response so far."

The campaign aims to make progress for children based on internationally agreed goals in four key areas - the prevention of mother-to-child transmission, paediatric treatment, prevention and protection and support for children affected by Aids.

David Bull, the executive director of Unicef UK, and the Unicef ambassador Jemima Khan launched the campaign with Nais Mason, a Unicef advisor in Africa.

The charity UNaids said £31m was needed to fight Aids in the next three years, but that there was a funding gap of at least £10m from 2005-2007 and called for a dramatic increase in Aids funding, with a significant proportion targeted at helping children.

Meanwhile, it today emerged that a study by researchers in France and South Africa found male circumcision significantly protected men from contracting up the infection (read the Guardian story here).

The study, which examined infection rates in more than 3,000 heterosexual men over nearly two years, found circumcision reduced a man's risk of contracting HIV by 60%.

Some health campaigners expressed fears that news of the findings could encourage people to take more risks.