"They are forgotten," said the Countess Albina du Boisvouvray, "and they are last in line for everything. If we don't provide for them and get them back into society, as productive human beings, they will end up on the street, sexually abused, forced into labor, recruited into an army of child soldiers, terrorists, or they will simply die of hunger and disease."

The countess--she prefers to be called simply Albina--is a former journalist and movie producer, a Frenchwoman living in Switzerland, whose life took an extraordinary turn in 1989, after the death of her son, François-Xavier Bagnoud, a helicopter rescue pilot. In his honor she founded the Association François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB), which she still serves as president, committed to helping children stricken with, or left orphaned by, AIDS. She also founded the François-Xavier Bagnoud Center for Health and Human Rights at the Harvard University School of Public Health. Albina remains convinced that health and human rights issues are not only intertwined but are at the core of many global problems. "Globalization is often thought of in economic, political or communications terms," she said, "but we do not look enough at the effects of cultures, families, traditions, poverty, nonexistent health care systems, epidemics and, yes, terrorism and its tragedies." She continued:

"We do not use enough the analytic tools of the inextricable link between health and human rights, applying them to social analysis to foresee the social consequences of the deprivation of the poor. Where exclusion, loss of dignity, lack of education, poverty fester and thrive, this unhealthy social fabric breeds social diseases of instability and insecurity, leading to epidemics of war and terrorism."

"The potential for global terror and disruption among 100 million parentless children who have nothing and are open to all sorts of evil enticements is staggering," she said. "Studies in the industrialized world have demonstrated that the same conditions suffered by AIDS orphans have produced violence, criminal actions and deaths in developed countries."

And just as the whole world gravely underestimated the impact that HIV/AIDS was having on Africa until it was too late, Albina is concerned that the spread of the pandemic is being dangerously underestimated in Russia, China and India. She said that FXB studies of migrant workers in India and China show that HIV prevalence in vulnerable groups rose 17 percent in a matter of months. "It is important to remember, she added, "that an unchecked epidemic doubles every year."

"What surfaced in Africa after and invisible and silent spread of 10 years is about to surface in China, Russia, India and Eastern Europe," she said. "As for the number of children who will find themselves de-civilized and out of the safety net of society, we must remember that there are also another 100 million children who roam the streets of our megacities, street kids, identified since 1991 Š In a world reeling from terror, these children are among the prime recruits in an army of already as least 300,000 child soldiers involved in 33 conflicts in almost every region of the world. Thirty percent of the guerrillas in Colombia are under 18 years of go. And we know that al Qaeda and the Taliban recruited and fielded children under 13 years of age."

She added that the growing numbers of AIDS orphans and street children of the world "are a spreading soft spot on our global body, a new source of vulnerability. These children have no voice -children do not buy, vote or lobby. FXB has chosen to put all its energy into becoming a voice not only for the expected 100 million orphans of the AIDS pandemic, in this decade, but for all children in the same state of destitution and despair reeled backwards into de-civilization."