owned farms to landless blacks. The country will hold parliamentary elections on March 31. While both the ruling ZANU-PF party and the main opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) pledge in their manifestos to step up the war on AIDS, politicians say little about AIDS in their public campaigns. Carol Bellamy, head of the U.N. children's agency UNICEF, said this month that AIDS killed a Zimbabwean child every 15 minutes. UNICEF says the under-5 mortality rate has risen 50 percent since 1990 and is now 1 death in every 8 births. In addition 1 in 5 Zimbabwean children are now orphans and 160,000 children will suffer the death of a parent this year. Although he did not have conclusive data, Dehne said the good news from Zimbabwe was that the infection rate had slowed among some groups, condom use had risen sharply over the past few years indicating people were changing their sexual behaviour while the prevalence rates among adults appeared steady.
