By William Maclean
Nairobi - Abandoned by her husband and shunned by neighbours, HIV-positive Anna Akeyo sits in a one-room shack in Nairobi's Kibera slum, helpless as the virus gnaws away at her immune system.
Hungry, frightened and too weak to fend for her two children, Akeyo's plight is typical of many of the 26,6 million people infected with the disease in Africa: she is a woman who has no resources to mount even a token defence against Aids - no running water, no electricity, no work and no government services of any kind.
Outside the front door, raw sewage and waste water flow in a frothing scum on either side of an alleyway lined with tin-roofed mud huts.
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'Hungry, frightened and too weak to fend for her two children' "I have eaten nothing all day," the penniless, thin-looking 26-year-old tells health worker Tabitha Festo who visits her shack in late afternoon.
"My neighbours are tired of helping me."
Her eyes widen briefly with pleasure as Festo presents her with a gift: a package of maize meal and two small cartons of milk.
Eight hundred Kenyans die every day from Aids, which has already killed 1,5 million people in the east African country and infects two million out of the country's 30 million population.
With most living on less than a dollar a day, few can buy the anti-retroviral (ARV) medicines that help to prolong life.
'My neighbours are tired of helping me' United Nations health workers hope that will soon change.
On Monday, a few miles from Kibera, officials of the World Health Organisation (WHO) will unveil an ambitious global strategy to help three million people around the world get access to ARV treatment by the end of 2005.
The disease in Akeyo's body is not advanced enough to qualify her for ARV, but when that time comes she hopes to get on a waiting list for free ARV treatment provided by charities.
If she is successful she will become one of only 12 000 Kenyans now on ARVs, a tiny number compared to the 200 000 Kenyans in need of them.
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