My Africa Today

Seventy per cent of adults and 80 percent of children with HIV/AIDS live in Africa. The total number of Africans living with HIV or AIDS has reached 25.3 million, and during the year 2000 alone, 2.4 million Africans died of HIV-related causes.

Here are some of the faces behind the statistics.









Villagers in Masogo, Kenya attend a funeral for a suspected AIDS victim.


Family and friends pay their respects to a dead relative in Masogo, Kenya, an area with an exceptionally high AIDS rates.


A suspected AIDS patient rests in bed at her home in Masogo, in western Kenya. Many of the villagers are HIV-infected but few acknowledge it because of the stigma of AIDS.

A religious healer in Lagos, Nigeria talks to women infected by HIV. Without access to medical treatment, many Africans put their faith in spiritual cures.


A prostitute stands outside her home in Nairobi, Kenya. She is one of a small group of prostitutes at the center of AIDS research because they fail to become infected by HIV despite repeated exposure.


Family members visit a patient at the main hospital in Kinshasa, Congo. Almost half the patients in this ward have AIDS.



A girl holds her baby sister at the edge of a sugarcane field near Hlabisa in South Africa's Kwazulu-Natal province, one of the world's worst AIDS hotspots. AIDS has left many children here without parents.



A sick woman sits at home with her son at a housing project in Kinshasa, Congo for people affected by AIDS.

A man with terminal AIDS-related tuberculosis sits on his hospital bed in Gulu, northern Uganda.