East Africa
The UNAIDS/WHO 2005 HIV report described East Africa as a region providing “the most hopeful indications that serious AIDS epidemics can be reversed.”
Good News
UNAIDS made the statement on this page largely in reference to Kenya, a country where HIV prevalence dropped from 10 percent of the adult population during the epidemic’s peak in 1990 to seven percent in 2003. The greatest drops were among pregnant women in urban areas.
While Kenya has made successful strides in reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS, the country still has an estimated 1.2 million people living with the virus. In addition, 10 percent of the country’s children in 2003 were orphans, 650,000 of them because of AIDS. These numbers may actually be much higher, because people die of related diseases like tuberculosis and they don’t often record these deaths as being AIDS-related. Also, because AIDS is so stigmatized, many people refuse to acknowledge that they are infected.
AIDS not only affects those living with the disease, it also affects those caring for them. This burden falls largely on girls, who drop out of school at a much greater rate than boys in part because they are needed at home to care for sick and dying parents.
Fact File
In Kenya, two people die of AIDS every five minutes.
There are about 2.5 million orphans in Tanzania—980,000 of these lost their parents to AIDS.
The leading killer of children in Tanzania is malaria. That malaria claims so many lives is even more tragic because it is treatable. Malaria especially affects children and pregnant women, the latter running the risk of delivering stillborn or premature babies if they have malaria during pregnancy.