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Chuck Gollmar,
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
Porto Alegre, Brazil, 24 July 2004
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Thank you (to who ever introduces me and any important people) and good morning ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for the opportunity to be a part of your conference and the valuable work you do.
I bring greetings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. For many years, the CDC has shared your goal of improving the lives of youth both in our country and around the world. We work toward that goal by supporting the implementation of school health programs in general and HIV prevention education in schools in particular. While most of our resources are spent domestically, we have also committed to working globally as well. Since the early 1990's we have had a senior staff person at WHO to support and develop school health activities in that organization and with WHO's partners. EI has become one of our most important partners.
We share your interest in achieving the major Education For All (EFA) goal that all children, including all girls, will attend school by 2015.
However, as you know, in many parts of the world, children and adolescents suffer needlessly from preventable health problems that can impede their education:
- Worm infections are the greatest cause of disease among 5-14 year old children;
- Injury is the leading cause of death and disability among school-age youth;
- One out of two young people who start and continue to smoke will be killed by tobacco-related illness;
- Worldwide, 5% of all deaths of young people between the ages of 15 and 29 are attributable to alcohol use;
- Vitamin A deficiency is the single greatest cause of preventable childhood blindness; and
- Iodine deficiency is the single most common preventable cause of mental retardation and brain damage in children.
Probably, most significantly, children are at the center of the world wide HIV and AIDS epidemic. Based on the recently released UNAIDS 2004 Report on the Global AIDS Epidemic
- Of the nearly 40 million people worldwide living with HIV/AIDS, over 2.5 million are under age 15.
- In some countries, up to 60% of all new HIV infections occur among 15-24 year olds.
- In 2003, 700,000 children under age 15 were newly infected with HIV. Almost 2000 per day.
- In 2003 500,000 children under age 15 died of AIDS
- As in the past, the majority of those persons lived in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Every country has AIDS orphans. In Africa there are millions. 12 million in Sub-Saharan Africa alone.
The EFA goal of 100% enrollment may not be obtainable in those countries with high HIV infection rates because of HIV's impact on the supply of teachers, school attendance, student enrollment, and educational quality.
- Teachers and lecturers belong to the most HIV-affected age group. Many countries in southern Africa are facing teacher shortages if not now in the very near future. To replace these teachers will require resources and planning that many countries are just not in a position to support at this time.
- Many AIDS-affected families may withdraw children from school to compensate for labor losses, increased care activities, and competing expenses. If the mother is dying or has died, children, particularly girls, are needed for household duties. This practice reinforces gender inequities, deepens household poverty, and threatens future generations.
- The AIDS epidemic may threaten school enrollment in other ways as well. For example, AIDS reduces fertility and the number of school-age children in a population. AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children may never be enrolled in school or be provided with the necessary school fees.
- Education quality also may suffer as teachers succumb to the disease. This is because of more inexperienced and under-qualified teachers who take the place of those teachers who have taken ill or died and increased class sizes that result from the lack of teachers overall. Skilled teachers are not easily replaced and training may be beyond the capacity of many countries' university or college system.
Extra-ordinary actions are required to prevent the epidemic from doing permanent damage to education systems and students. Teacher's Unions can take extra-ordinary actions.
Indeed, Teacher's Unions are in a unique position to implement programs in schools that can help to reverse some of the impact of the AIDS epidemic and other health problems experienced by youth. Research has shown that for children and adolescents to change their behaviors they must be taught skills as well as knowledge. As teachers, you can do that. Besides the immediate family, teachers have more contact and influence on children than any other individual. Teachers need to use this opportunity to provide important knowledge and skills to their students.
One global project that is being undertaken with EI, WHO, and the Education Development Center is the Teacher Training for HIV Prevention project. It has been underway for the past several years. The project is conducted through national level Teacher's Unions in 17 countries, mostly in Sub Saharan Africa. The project calls on the Unions to work closely with the Ministries of Health and Education in their countries along with other relevant partners to implement a training program for teachers that will provide them with the skills they need to protect themselves from HIV infection and to help other teachers and their students do the same.
CDC is proud to work with EI and WHO to implement and evaluate this effort. To date the data provided by the Unions in the 17 participating countries indicate that over 50,000 teachers have been reached. This document on Participatory Learning Activities from the EI/WHO Training Manual on School Health and HIV and AIDS Prevention contains exercises for teachers to use to pass on important skills to their colleagues and students. Together, EI, WHO, and EDC plan to produce over 100,000 of these documents with the aim of providing at least one to each school with a trained teacher in all participating countries.
In closing, I would like you to know that CDC has been supporting HIV prevention education since 1986. At the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in the US, two national leaders made it possible for U.S. schools to rapidly educate young people about the epidemic and how to avoid infection: C. Everett Koop, then Surgeon General of the United States, and Mary Futrell, then President of the National Education Association. When she became president of EI, Mary Futrell extended her commitment to enable the world's schools to educate young people about an epidemic that threatens the future of entire peoples and entire nations. She never shrank from the controversy or her commitment; and for that, peoples and nations around the world owe her an enduring debt of gratitude. In recognition of her support, we have a framed copy of the cover of the new WHO/EI/EDC document on Participatory Learning Activities from the EI/WHO Training Manual on School Health and HIV and AIDS Prevention.
Mary - would you please come forward to except this token of our admiration for you and the very important work you have done for children in the US and around the world.
Thank you.
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