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HEALTH: Conscience Needs a Celebrity

Sanjay Suri

LONDON, Oct 25 2005 (IPS) - The situation of children born into AIDS is shocking, but Unicef believes it may still take a celebrity to get people to feel the shock.

And so the five-year campaign launched by the United Nations children’s agency to deal with AIDS among children is being fronted by Jemima Khan, who became famous as the daughter of the late British tycoon Sir James Goldsmith, as Princess Diana’s friend, and then as wife of Pakistani cricketer Imran Khan.

“I feel passionately that I can make a lot of difference in some ways to help with the problem,” Jemima Khan told IPS in an interview Tuesday. “My campaign is to go to countries most affected by the problem, to raise awareness and to help with fundraising..”

Jemima Khan has recently visited Kenya, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Romania in support of the Unicef campaign. “I’ll be involved with the campaign for as long as it takes,” she said.

The AIDS campaign is not the only one she is involved in. “At the moment I’ve been involved with the earthquake appeal in Pakistan, that is obviously something very close to my heart, having lived there for eight years,” she said. “It’s something I’ve been incredibly shocked by, and trying to do anything I possibly can to help.”

Jemima Khan is working with both Unicef and with Imran Khan on the earthquake appeal.

“I’ve been involved in promoting Unicef work for victims of the earthquake, and also my ex-husband’s appeal,” she said. “Both are doing much the same thing. But I personally have been, in my own small capacity, I’ve been collecting blankets and tents. The first lot goes out this Thursday. I’m trying to speak to a lot of high street retailers in order to get warm clothes and tents to supply on a large scale.”

Unicef hopes that celebrity faces will bring the cameras, that their pictures and stories will bring attention to the cause they promote. The need for that attention to the difficulties is urgent, it says.

“Children are the missing face of AIDS,” David Bull, executive director of Unicef UK, told IPS. “One child dies of AIDS every minute of the day. Fifteen million children have been orphaned already, and that number will increase to 20 million over the next five years. It’s desperate. It’s a disgrace that we haven’t done more about it.”

While the world attention is focused on Africa, experts are warning of growing danger in countries like India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

“It’s a problem in different ways in different parts of the world,” Bull said. “Africa has the highest rates of HIV infection. But South Asia has of course a very high population, so even small prevalence rates mean very large numbers. The numbers in South Asia are very high, but they still have the opportunity to prevent the prevalence rates from becoming even higher.”

While Unicef has drawn up a litany of stark statistics on AIDS among children, it is relying on affected people and even children themselves to get the message across.

Nais Mason, a Kenyan who has been HIV-positive for the past 18 years, described what it can mean to be HIV-positive and have children.

“My daughter was breast-feeding three months prior to my diagnosis,” she told IPS. “I’m very lucky that she did not become HIV-positive. I have been able to live for her entire childhood. Now she is 18, she is in college, and that is only because I had access to care, treatment and support, even to help me address the stigma you experience within families, within communities. It’s one of the things that kills people.”

Reitumetse Phooko, 13, from Lesotho, a tiny landlocked country of 1.8 million surrounded by South Africa, is already campaigning to raise awareness of what AIDS can do to children. The country has an average life expectancy of less than 37 years, and an HIV prevalence rate of almost 30 percent.

“I know that a friend of mine is HIV-positive, and she gets hassled by her neighbours and by some children in school,” she told IPS. “But this is getting a bit better because now they have knowledge of how HIV can be transmitted from one person to another..”

David Bull says the Unicef campaign aims to build on such positive signs, and it believes that the problem can be tackled.

“This is a five-year campaign,” he said. “We want to raise a lot of money for Unicef, we will be talking to the public, to governments, to international organisations and to the media, trying to get everybody involved. We know what to do, we know how to solve this problem, we have to bring it to scale.”