A baby-trafficking ring was reportedly busted in China last week, with ten people arrested for collecting some 40 month-old babies for sale. (That's 40 babies of the age of one-month-ish, not some three-year olds, just in case that's not clear. )

Like the 2004 case that netted 54 traffickers and 100 buyers and found 28 drugged and bound babies stuffed into bags on a bus headed north from Guangxi, the one-child policy that does girls no favors is mentioned as a source of infants.

Do I need to mention that none of this has anything to do with international adoption, that trafficking in babies, kidnapping ... awful stuff like that ... happens with NO connection to hopeful adoptive families in America?

No one child policy in Africa, but in certain families the AIDS toll is amounting to about the same sort of numbers. In this story out of Kenya one man's get-togethers are shown to be shrinking, as in the past eleven years he has lost seven uncles, six aunts, five cousins and both his parents, all to AIDS. His clan now includes him, an uncle, an aunt, and a 2-year-old cousin, all with the disease.

The story is about circumcision, as this family belongs to the only major tribe in Kenya that doesn't circumcise their boys, and many are saying this is the reason the Luos are dying from AIDS at a rate unheard of in all of East Africa.

Most African tribes traditionally circumcise boys in rituals marking the onset of manhood. But the Luos and some other Nilotic tribes, whose ancestors migrated south from Sudan, used to mark the end of childhood in a different but also painful way -- removing six bottom front teeth.

Although it may seem easy for me to say, leaving the teeth and losing the foreskin seems a sensible swap.

An epidemiologist from the University of Illinois at Chicago who was involved in research in Kenya that resulted in circumcision being hailed as the "most proven, effective HIV prevention strategy we have for male heterosexuals", has calculated that an effective program of circumcision among Luo men could cut the HIV rate from 18% to 8% over 20 years, a drop that would avert tens of thousands of infections.

He adds that, if the same were to happen across Africa, 5.7 million lives would be saved.

Unfortunately, but predictably, the old git who runs the Luo tribe doesn't buy the idea, but instead blames the abandonment of traditional culture for the problem.

"We don't want foreigners to interfere with our culture. It is absolutely wrong."

The younger men aren't against the circumcision idea, apparently, as a survey showing 60% in favor because "they believed it was cleaner and healthier" was heavily impacted by the under-25 set.

Also in Kenya, the Vice President, Moody Awori, has warned that the number of street kids in the country could hit 2.5 million by 2010.

That's a pretty scary concept, and one political types should be making a lot of noise about.

"Giving children a chance to reach their full potential will help them to contribute to the growth of our economy and save the country and society high costs of dealing with the destitute."

Well, yeah.

The way they're looking at dealing with the issue is pretty lame, though; getting Barclays Bank and UNICEF to hand over millions of shillings for something they're calling "Banking on Brighter Futures". Why always with the cutsie titles?

Saying the government is "formulating a national policy for children", and calling on Kenyans to "contribute towards the welfare of Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC)", the Veep adds that the "Banking on" thingy is supposed to assist 4,000 street kids over the next three years with drop-in centers in some of the cities.

I wonder who does his math ...