13.4m children lose parents to AIDS
The report, Children on the Brink, was released yesterday at the 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona. It states that more than 13.4 million children in sub-Saharan Africa, Asia and Latin America have lost one or both parents to AIDS and that number is expected to almost double to 25 million by 2010.
The report found Africa has the greatest proportion of children who are orphans.
In 2001, 34 million children in sub-Saharan Africa were orphans, one-third of them due to AIDS. By 2010, 20 million children - 6% of all children in Africa - will be orphaned due to AIDS.
Because of Asia's large population it has a larger number of orphans overall than Africa and in 2001 around two million were orphaned because of AIDS.
The report warns the populations in many Asian countries are so large that even at a low prevalence, the number of people with HIV and or AIDS threatens to surpass the numbers in some of the most severely affected African countries. Even a relatively small increase in prevalence could lead to even greater numbers of orphans due to AIDS, it states.
