It is a picture of slow and agonizing death. A picture of a continent wasting away. Africa is being ravaged by AIDS like nowhere else. According to the latest figures from the United Nations, 23.3 million Africans have HIV or AIDS. That's nearly 70 per cent of all HIV and AIDS cases in the world. About eight of every 10 people who die of AIDS are African.

Those numbers tell a catastrophic story. But it's a story most Africans don't want to hear. And that is at the heart of the problem.

Emily Ocheno is only 16-years-old. She is dying. She fights to hold on to what little life is left in her frail body. But in a hospital ward in Homa Bay, Kenya, the killer has no name. Emily has AIDS.

Reverend Simon Onyanga has watched AIDS decimate his congregation. But he is also shocked at the level of denial. Despite the horrific toll, people refuse to admit that AIDS exists.

"If you are to ask her...she will talk about taboo, she will give you cultural reasons. She will talk about an opportunistic disease and tell you that is what she's suffering from. She will not tell you she is perishing because of HIV, says Rev. Onyanga.

Even the hospital won't officially admit there are AIDS patients. These are called TB wards. But unofficially doctors will say that virtually everyone here is HIV positive. Many have already developed full-blown AIDS.

"Have you been tested?" Martin Seemungal asks a patient.

"I have not yet," he replies

"Do you think maybe you have HIV?" Seemungal asks.

"I don't have, I don't have. I am sure," the man says.

AIDS swept into Kenya years ago. But as with many African countries, there's a stigma attached to it. Governments don't want to talk about it let alone deal with it. In fact it was only late last year, just a few months ago, that Kenya's president finally went public and declared AIDS a national disaster. But Dr. Fredric Omaya says the damage has already been done. Because the government refused to admit there was a problem, precious years have been lost.

"This has caused the problem to get out of proportion. And the infection now has gone all over like bush fire," Omaya says.

Across Kenya the infection rate is 15 per cent. But in some places, like Homa Bay, it's estimated that 70 per cent of adults have HIV. Homa Bay is a fishing town on the shores of Lake Victoria. When the fishermen come in with a catch, there are scores of women there to meet them, looking to get fish in exchange for sex. The women then sell the fish.

"They do sex because they need money. They need money," one woman says.

"And is there a lot of women coming doing that?" Seemungal says.

"Yes, most of them," she replies.

"So if every fishermen is going to do that and every women is also going to have boyfriends who are fishermen, the spread goes," says Rev. Onyanga.

This combination of cultural traditions and denial is threatening the entire continent. The death rate in this town alone has doubled in the past year. And while it has been the centre of a thriving fishing industry, AIDS is killing the people who steer the boats. Soon people fear there will be nobody left. Victims of the same killer without a name that is slowly but surely killing Emily. Doctors have done all they can. Only her God can help her now.

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First AIDS took their parents, then it took their childhood. Young Africans who have been cast out on their own by an epidemic. Everyday their numbers grow. The United Nations say AIDS has turned more than 11 million children worldwide into orphans. Ninety-five percent of those are in Africa. The U.N says the stigma of AIDS leaves them more vulnerable than children orphaned by other causes. Putting them at higher risk of malnutrition, sickness, abuse and sexual exploitation.

They're all orphans and they have something else in common. Their parents died of AIDS. Some were too young to remember how it happened.

Dan Okayu will never forget how it was like to watch his mother die. He says it was a slow, painful death.

"I was feeling really bad. I was crying everyday for God to help my mother," Okayu says.

The AIDS epidemic which is sweeping across the African continent is leaving millions of desperately poor orphans in its deadly wake. In Homa Bay, a poor, dusty town of 750,000 people in western Kenya, there are an estimated 35,000 orphans. These streets become home and the do anything they can to survive. They beg, they steal, some even turn to prostitution. They simply exist from day to day with no hope for any kind of productive future.

Laurence Kojerwan patrols the street of Homa Bay looking for orphans to take back to his orphanage.

"Here is a boy. If you give him future, if you give him hope, if you give him education, he can be just as good as any other child born in the west," Kojerwan says.

The purpose of his orphanage is to salvage a generation left to fend for itself. They are the AIDS victims who didn't die.

"If something isn't done, it becomes a disaster and it means the whole society, the whole generation will be wiped out!" Kojerwan says.

But he is trying to do it with very few resources. There is almost no support from the government.

In the hospital across town, doctors battle to save the lives of more mothers and fathers infected with HIV. Like many hospitals in Africa, there is a shortage of drugs. And even if the drugs were available, few people here could afford them.

"It is completely shocking," says Dr. Arno Jeannin of Doctors Without Borders. "There is an inequality in the access to care for people from where I was trained in France and people here. The difference is enormous.

So for people with HIV, the chances of survival are low. But Kenya is waking up to the scale of this disaster and is trying to educate the people about the danger of this disease which is killing so many people and leaving so many orphans behind.

"AIDS is now real. And people should refrain. In fact of late we have asked people to use condoms. If they have to do sex," one AIDS worker says.

This heightened awareness is certain to save lives in coming years. But so many people in this town have HIV. It is well over 50 per cent. The number of orphans is expected to double by the end of the year.

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