HARARE, April 11 (AFP) - Elderly people are increasingly having to care for the more than one million AIDS orphans in Zimbabwe, where one in four adults is HIV positive and 2,000 people die every week from the disease, officials said.
According to the Zimbabwean branch of HelpAge, an international non-governmental organisation, the impact of HIV/AIDS on older people is "devastating".
"HIV/AIDS has come heavily on older people. We have older people being forced to look after orphans," HelpAge Zimbabwe director Douglas Mhizha told AFP.
He said recent research conducted by the organisation showed that the elderly are caring for an average of 10 orphaned children each due to AIDS, which is killing mainly sexually active people in the 20-49 age group.
A paper presented by the Zimbabwe government at this week's UN conference on ageing in Madrid noted that the care problem associated with HIV/AIDS begins with tending to sick and dying offspring before shifting to the support of surviving grandchildren.
Because of the high cost of health care in a country where some 75 percent of the population lives in abject poverty, and hospitals that are failing to cope, many of Zimbabwe's sick end up being cared for by their ageing parents at home.
In desperate efforts to provide medical care for their sick children, parents usually exhaust their meagre resources and end up even poorer.
"The older persons who traditionally were cared for by their grown-up sons and daughters are now expected to assume breadwinner roles for their grandchildren," said the Zimbabwe government paper.
According to a 1997 government study, 17.3 percent of some 2.5 million households in Zimbabwe are headed by people 60 years or more.
Zimbabwe is estimated to have more than one million AIDS orphans.
In caring for both children with AIDS and at times grandchildren, the aged also expose themselves to HIV infection, Mhizha said.
Because anti-AIDS awareness campaigns target sexually active people, the elderly lack knowledge and "they do not know of the risks of looking after the AIDS sick," he said.
When looking after the orphans, they also face a psychological challenge of convincing the children to accept a lower standard of living, since many had been accustomed to urban lifestyles.
"It is quite taxing for the older people," said Mhizha. "It's quite a devastating effect."
AIDS kills an estimated 2,000 people a week in Zimbabwe, one of the countries worst affected by the pandemic.
The killer disease is expected to bring Zimbabwe's population growth down to zero this year, while life expectancy is projected to drop from 66 years in 1997 to 35 in 2010.
The onslaught of AIDS has dented Zimbabwe's economic growth because of increased medical costs and reduced household and national incomes due to illnesses and deaths of workers.
State hospitals and major private clinics often cannot cope and prematurely discharge AIDS patients.
AIDS in the farming sector was two years ago predicted to threaten the country's food security and had by then reduced the country's production of staple food crops by as much as 60 percent.
Zimbabwe is this year suffering one of the worst staple food shortages in living memory. But even with normal rainfalls, the elderly have little time left to tend to the fields as they will be caring for the sick.
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