|
AIDS Ravages Africa But Counter-Measures Take Off
JOHANNESBURG, June 3 (News Agencies) - AIDS has killed some 15 million people in Africa over the past 20 years, and more than 25 million Africans are HIV-positive, according to the UN agency UNAIDS.
In Botswana, more than a third of all adults are infected; in the other worst hit countries, it is one in four adults, or one in five.
But those figures come from official calculations, and South African President Thabo Mbeki warned when he opened an international AIDS Conference in the east coast city of Durban last year that if African nations were able to gather accurate statistics "our morbidity and mortality figures would tell a story that would truly be too frightening to contemplate".
Up to 95 percent of people infected with the HIV virus in developing countries probably do not know they are carriers, UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot said last week.
"Where we will be in over 20 years depends entirely on how we respond to the epidemic today," he said.
Measures to combat the pandemic are finally intensifying in Africa as governments and organizations work to overcome taboos, myths, and the stigma which means that AIDS is often hidden.
The UNAIDS figures show that despite the high incidence of AIDS south of the Sahara Desert, the rate is fewer than one in 100 in Muslim north Africa.
The African sufferers -- 70 percent of the global total -- are dying at such a rate -- in the absence of expensive drug cocktails which have reduced AIDS to a chronic disease in the west -- that cemeteries are filling up. In South Africa, officials are mulling the possibility of burying bodies vertically.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization said last month that deaths caused by HIV/AIDS in the 10 hardest-hit African countries could cut their rural workforce by a quarter by 2020.
Since 1985, some seven million agricultural workers have died from AIDS-related diseases in 24 African countries and some 16 million deaths are feared in the next two decades, it said.
More than 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa -- equivalent to every child in Britain under the age of 15 -- have been orphaned by AIDS, according to a report last month by the British charity Christian Aid.
By 2010, that figure will have risen to 43 million children, by which time the virus will have cost the South African economy alone more than 22 billion dollars, it warned.
That is creating thousands of street children, and child prostitutes.
But according to the French news agency AFP, there are some bright spots. One of them is that international drug companies are offering a number of drugs free, or at greatly reduced prices. They withdrew from a landmark court case against South Africa in April, allowing the government to import cheap copies of antiretroviral drugs, or manufacture them.
In Abuja, some 50 heads of state vowed at the end of an AIDS summit on April 27 to reserve at least 15 percent of their annual budgets for healthcare and to lift tariff barriers on AIDS-related programs.
Also, countries such as Uganda and Senegal with strong awareness programs are reportedly reducing the spread of the disease.
Finally, a global fund being set up to fight AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis has won pledges of 200 million dollars from the United States, 127 million dollars from France, 100 million from the International Olympic Committee, and 100 million from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
But leading South African AIDS researcher Hooven Coovadia described such contributions as "peanuts", and a UN study says Africa needs annual aid of between two and 10 billion dollars to counter the scourge.
Many health budgets in Africa, meanwhile, come to around five dollars per person per year, and governments are reluctant to take up offers even of free antiretroviral drugs because of the administration and follow-up costs.
In South Africa, 5,000 HIV-infected babies are born every month, destined to die by around the age of 10 if untreated, and rates are similar in other countries.
"Throughout Africa, the epidemic has literally put the future at stake," said the World Bank's Debrework Zewdie.
In southern Africa, Zewdie said, "life expectancy has fallen by half, poverty is deepening, and economic growth is slowing to a standstill."
|
