Helping Ethiopia's Lost Children.

This article focuses on the efforts of doctors to help Ethiopian children who have become orphaned and who may also have AIDS. Like most of the other 39 children sheltered by a high wall from the dusty roads of this busy capital of Ethiopia, Gashaw is HIV positive, forced to live in an orphanage because, like as many as 1 million other children in the East African country, her parents have died from AIDS. HIV in Ethiopia--which has one of the most dire AIDS epidemics in all of Africa--was a death sentence, especially for a child. But in the last year, the government began dispensing the drugs, known as anti-retroviral "cocktails," that have made HIV more manageable elsewhere since the early '90s. Now a team of doctors from Columbia University, selected by the New York-based Worldwide Orphans Foundation, has begun to teach 40 pediatricians from throughout Ethiopia how to administer the powerful medications to children. To keep all 40 kids on the antiretroviral drugs for a year will cost about $150,000, an exorbitant sum by Ethiopian standards. Pediatrician Jane Aronson, who founded Worldwide Orphans in 1997, hopes to raise $1 million for drugs and training in Ethiopia, where fear and ignorance compound the difficulties of treating AIDS.