Poverty and HIV/AIDS are the most severe threats to the well-being of South Africa's children, the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) said on Wednesday.

In South Africa alone, UNICEF said, around 1.1 million children lost their parents to HIV/AIDS in 2003, when more than 40,000 households were headed by children.

UNICEF estimates in its State of the World's Children Report 2005 that over 18 million African children will have lost one or both parents to HIV/AIDS by 2010 unless action is taken "swiftly and decisively" to stem the tidal wave of infection and loss.

UNICEF Executive Director Carol Bellamy said in the tenth annual report that HIV/AIDS was tearing at the very fabric of childhood.

It has found that more than one billion children are being denied the healthy, protected upbringing promised by the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

"Too many governments are making informed, deliberate choices that actually hurt childhood," said Bellamy.

"Poverty doesn't come from nowhere; war doesn't emerge from nothing; AIDS doesn't spread by choice of its own. These are our choices."

"When half the world's children are growing up hungry and unhealthy, when schools have become targets and whole villages are being emptied by AIDS, we've failed to deliver on the promise of childhood," she said.

Gains made in children's rights to survival, health and education under the Convention -- ratified by South Africa in 1995-- were in danger of reversal because of poverty, conflict and HIV/AIDS, said Bellamy.

Although not the only factors undermining childhood, these were having "profoundly damaging" effects on children's chances of survival and development.

The harm they caused lingered well beyond childhood, increasing the likelihood of the next generation being affected by the same threats. Even if new infections stabilized or fell, the crisis would worsen for at least the next decade because of the time lag between infection and death.

It was particularly in sub-Saharan Africa that HIV/AIDS was crippling communities as their key human resources -- farmers, teachers, health workers, police and military personnel - fell sick and died. It had also led to increasing child mortality rates, dramatic reductions in life expectancy and millions of orphans, said Bellamy.

Of 15 million children under 18 orphaned by HIV/AIDS by the end of 2003, eight out of 10 lived in sub-Saharan Africa, she said.

More than just the loss of a care-giver, the loss of a parent pervaded the emotional well-being, physical security, mental development and overall health of a child, said Bellamy.

Deprived of the families who were their best defense against harm and injury, children's chances of education were jeopardized and they were made vulnerable to violence, abuse, exploitation, stigmatization, discrimination and poverty.

Source: Xinhua