Vulnerability to sexually transmitted disease: street children

Nearly twenty years since its discovery, AIDS still remains a ‘planetary emergency’, in the words of the UN Secretary General. AIDS is a threat to humanity which affects all societies and hinders social and economic development. It causes physical and emotional suffering, and is often used to justify grave violations of human rights. Although we have learnt much about how the disease is transmitted and the groups that are at higher risk, we still do not know how to protect the rights of people with HIV/AIDS, and of people who are particularly vulnerable to infection. People react to issues according to the way they perceive them. AIDS seems to have thrived on controversy; at first over the origin of the virus which causes it. Blaming certain groups as the source of the disease has now stopped, perhaps because of theories which implicate the people who began the blaming. Many people do not seem to know the other controversy over the HIV theory of AIDS: that HIV is the sole cause of AIDS in human beings. For almost as long as AIDS has been with us, a small group of scientists has been trying to draw attention to inadequacies in the theory that AIDS was caused by a deadly new virus, HIV. This group claims that the disease is not behaving as would be expected if th