AIDS epidemic ‘may explode again’ in Africa

The HIV/Aids epidemic in Africa will explode again unless parents and teachers start to talk to teenagers about sex, experts have warned.

HIV/Aids is the main cause of death among 10- to 19-year-olds in Africa and this is the only age group globally where Aids-related deaths are rising.

Leaders also need to make it easier for under-18s to access HIV testing and treatment, ensure all children go to school, and protect girls from sexual exploitation, experts said at the launch of a campaign to end adolescent HIV/Aids.

“Nobody wants to talk about adolescents having sex,” said Luiz Loures, deputy executive director of UNAids.

“[But] if we don’t break these taboos... if we don’t change in the next five years, this epidemic is going to explode again.”

There are 2.1m adolescents worldwide living with HIV, 80% of them in Africa. The majority do not know they have HIV and became infected at birth or through breastfeeding.

Although the fight against Aids is making progress globally, current policies are failing to save the lives of teenagers, trapped in a toxic cycle of poverty, ignorance, and moral conservatism.

In 2013, there were 250,000 new HIV infections among adolescents, two thirds among girls, and 120,000 adolescents died from Aids-related illnesses, the UN said.

Life can be brutal in Nairobi’s slums, with alcoholic parents who fail to provide, or who push their daughters into the sex trade to feed the rest of the family.

Girls as young as 10 often have sex to survive, only to end up becoming mothers themselves — infected with the same disease that robbed them of their parents.

“My younger sisters were relying on me so I did it [had sex with men] to provide for them,” said one girl, who was orphaned at the age of six and found out she was HIV positive when she became pregnant at 14.

“I don’t have any dreams for my [two-year-old] daughter’s future because I don’t know when I am going to die. Maybe she will go through the same experience as me,” the 16-year-old said through tears.

There are over 100,000 new HIV infections in Kenya each year, 21% of which are among girls and women aged between 15 and 24.

The infection rate among Kenyan females aged 15 to 24 is four times that of males.