Kenya's slums battle AIDS

Rachel is sitting alone in the matchbox-size, sunlit library reading the last chapter of "The Scarlet Letter."

Next, she says, her pale hands shaking, she is going to go for a mystery.

In the adjacent room, a group of thin young men are working on a play for Tuesday's drama festival. A power outage has cut short the computer class down the hall, and a trickle of potential thespian volunteers are drifting in, shyly inquiring about bit parts.

The Kibera Community Self Help Program (KICOSHEP) is a youth center situated in the middle of one of Nairobi's biggest slums. It caters to youngsters who are diagnosed as HIV positive as well as those who are not infected – but who, statistically, are at risk of becoming so.

KICOSHEP is also one of the best examples in Africa of a homegrown, privately funded AIDS prevention program.

In Kenya, it's estimated that an average of 600 people die from AIDS every day. And yet, this is not the African country worst hit by the scourge. In South Africa, for one example, almost five million people, or 1 in 9 citizens, are estimated to be HIV-infected.

Seventy percent of the world's estimated 40 million people living with HIV/AIDS are in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the World Health Organization. Seventeen million Africans have already died since the epidemic began in the late 1970s – and 12 million children have been left orphaned.

A world away from this tiny Kenyan community center, some 15,000 doctors, researchers, and activists gathered this week in Barcelona, Spain, to present the latest studies about AIDS and examine ways to deal with it. Africa is a focus of concern.

New research by the US Census Bureau shows that within 10 years, the average life expectancy in 11 African countries will drop below age 40 as HIV/AIDS continues to shorten lifespans. The average life expectancy in those countries hardest hit by the disease – Botswana and Mozambique – is predicted to drop to just 27 years.

There is much talk at the Barcelona conference about accelerating research for vaccines, advances in antiretroviral drugs, and the need for financial assistance from developing countries to combat the disease in less developed ones. AIDS activists are demanding that affordable drugs be made available to developing countries.

Campaigners are disappointed that less than $3 billion has so far been pledged of the $10 billion sought by the UN global AIDS fund.

But experts say that advances in drug therapy and vaccines aren't enough. "HIV vaccines need to be developed within the context of a larger prevention effort," Dr. Lawrence Corey, of the HIV Vaccine Trials Network in the United States, told conference attendees in Barcelona.

Here in Kibera, prevention is often the only option available.

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