AIDS-hit Zimbabwe has highest orphan rate: UN official
Zimbabwe has the highest number of orphans in the world in relation to its population, mainly due to the HIV/AIDS pandemic blighting the economically ravaged country, a UN official has said. “Zimbabwe has the highest number of orphans per capita in the world,” James Elder, a spokesman for the UN Children’s Fund UNICEF told AFP Sunday. “Most of these cases are due to HIV and AIDS,” he said.
AFP/Yahoo, 19th November 2006

Discrimination against AIDS patients will be curbed
Chennai, India: A bill will be introduced in the budget session of Parliament to prevent discrimination against HIV/AIDS affected persons in places of education, work and treatment, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said on Saturday. The Hindu Times, 19th November 2006

Demystifying AIDS
AIDS still isn't much talked about in China, so an exhibit of joyous art by AIDS orphans, often paintings of happy families, is an effort to raise awareness and help end bias against these lonely kids, writes Yao Mingji. Shang-Hai Daily, 17th November 2006

African children often lack available AIDS treatment
Yaoundé, Cameroon: Five-year-old Anastasia Enongo lies curled like a foetus in the top bunk of the hospital here, coughing weakly, intravenous medicine dripping into her arm. Born to a mother who died of AIDS, the girl has always been sick, relatives said with an air of annoyance, her life a parade of doctors' visits for fevers, coughs, diarrhoea. It was not until February that Anastasia was tested for AIDS; the result explained her maladies. New York Times, 15th November 2006

Where the heart is
“HIV/AIDS exacerbates poverty effects on young children. In addition, it increases disabling deprivations suffered by young children, because family livelihoods and employment income are lost when breadwinners become ill and die, and when available family resources have to be shared amongst affected kin. There are also features of the HIV/AIDS epidemic that pose particular threats to early childhood development. Young children may have to live with withdrawn, preoccupied and ill caregivers, they may lose parents through illness and death, and suffer social instability if they are moved from one home to another during a time in their lives when such loss and instability is maximally injurious to their health and wellbeing.” Linda Richter, Geoff Foster and Lorraine Sherr

Where the heart is: Meeting the psychosocial needs of young children in the context of HIV/AIDS, July 2006

Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance (EAA) work on HIV and AIDS
The EAA is a faith-based organisation with over 90 sponsoring members. Its mission is focused on advocacy to fight HIV and AIDS and promote just, equitable and sustainable global trade. The EAA provides excellent educational resource materials on HIV and AIDS.

www.e-alliance.ch/hiv_resources.jsp

Origin of Aids - A Scientific Controversy
In his 1999 book The River, author Edward Hooper, a former BBC journalist, charted a remarkable theory regarding the possible origins of AIDS. He presented strong circumstantial evidence that pointed to the inadvertent contamination of an experimental oral polio vaccine administered in Africa in the late 1950s. Hooper argues that this vaccine most likely became the vehicle by which a simian precursor of HIV/AIDS carried by chimpanzees was able to jump the species barrier into humans. Hooper is being challenged to find concrete evidence to back up his contentions. The documentary follows Hooper to Burundi and the Ruzizi valley in Rwanda , both areas where the local communities were used as guinea pigs in the trial of early polio vaccines.

SBS TV, 1st December, 2006, 1:00 pm

Do you hear the lonely, mourning in exile,
the cries of a young girl who will never know her father's hand,
the plea of a teenager forced to raise his sisters and brothers,
the desperation of a grandmother with 10 grandchildren to feed
for whom there is only loss, only grief, only empty promises?

Advent in a time of AIDS – Keep the Promise an Ecumenical liturgy for World AIDS Day 2006 from the Ecumenical Advocacy Alliance.

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