Botswana has been getting a lot of calls lately from across the African continent, prodding the nation — once “at risk of extinction” from HIV — to tell the world how they did the impossible: squash childhood HIV rates.

The number of children living with HIV has declined sharply everywhere, but nowhere more so than in Botswana, which has managed to slash its childhood infection rate by more than 98 percent since the 1990s.

At its peak, in what was one of the world’s worst outbreaks of HIV, one in eight infants were infected at birth. Mortality in young kids nearly doubled over a decade, with 3,000 children dying of AIDS each year. And 25,000 children — one in every classroom of 25 — had long-term symptoms of the virus, which without treatment, destroys the body’s immune system, turning e

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