LUANDA, Dec 1 (AFP) - Angola officially has an HIV/AIDS infection rate of five percent, the lowest in southern Africa, but health officials fear a rapid spread of the virus arising from three free movement after a 27-year civil war.
Authorities in the sprawling former Portuguese colony have launched a "national fight against AIDS," supervised by a national AIDS institute set up only last month.
Those already living with the virus are grappling to obtain treatment in a country where infrastructure and health services have been ravaged by the war, which broke out almost simultaneously with independence 30 years ago.
The 1975-2002 war resulted in damages of about 40 billion dollars (34 billion euros), according to President Jose Eduardo dos Santos, and claimed some 500,000 lives.
There are currently a total of 2,871 recorded cases of HIV/AIDS out of a population of 13.8 million, according to the latest statistics by the health ministry, which independent experts describe as a gross underestimation.
There is a real fear that the virus will spread alarmingly "due to the free movement of people after the end of the war," said Delma Monteiro, who supervises a programme dealing with the rights of the HIV-positive in the Association of Justice, Peace and Democracy (AJPD), a non-governmental organisation.
Forder areas are already badly affected, especially in southern Cunene, which has an HIV/AIDS rate of 9.12 percent, and the northern region of Uige where the rate is 4.8 percent, according to the health ministry.
"The biggest problem we are faced with in this country is the total lack of reliable figures. There has been no real count in the past so many years," said Antonio Vidal, who heads the Luanda mission of the charity Medecins Sans Frontieres-Switzerland (MSF, Doctors Without Borders).
To exacerbate the situation, there is a crippling lack of trained medical personnel. There is currently only one doctor for every 10,000 inhabitants and vast swathes of the country still have landmines and are therefore no-go areas.
Anti-retrovirals are distributed only in one public hospital in Luanda.
Vidal said this had to "extended throughout the entire country so that the fight for prevention is fruitful and the ailing actually get treatment."
Civic associations meanwhile are concerned about the marginalisation of those living with HIV or AIDS.
Monteiro said many people lost their jobs after testing positive and spoke of mandatory testing imposed by the many foreign petrol and diamond companies working in mineral-rich Angola.
The AJPD meanwhile has meanwhile called for amended laws on the rights of HIV-positive people, approved in 2004, which includes sanctions against firms refusing to employ HIV-positive people.
"We are in the process of re-writing the entire text with the National Institute for the Fight Against AIDS," she said.
The social welfare ministry has for its part launched a campaign called "Know your Rights and Duties," and created a telephone hotline for HIV-positive people seeking jobs.
"AIDS prevention will protect the workforce which Angola sorely needs for the reconstruction process," the ministry said recently in a statement.
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