GENEVA, Dec 1, 2006 (AFP) - HIV/AIDS will exact a growing toll on the world's labour force despite improved access to life-saving treatments and slow down economic growth in the hardest-hit countries, the International Labour Organisation warned on Friday.
While 3.4 million working-age youth and adults died annually in 2005 as a result of the disease, this is expected to rise to 4.5 million by 2020, the ILO said in a report ahead of World AIDS Day on December 1.
Cumulative deaths in the global labour force are projected to rise to nearly 86 million by 2020 from 28 million estimated for 2005, despite better access to antiretroviral drug therapy (ARVs), it added.
The ILO included a measure of the rising economic burden each worker will have to carry due to the death or disability of other members of the population caused by HIV/AIDS.
"The economic burden on each labour force participant is expected to increase globally from 0.5 percent to 1.7 percent between 2005 and 2020, and from 4.0 percent to 7.2 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa over the same period," the report said.
Sub-Saharan Africa has some of the world's highest infection and death rates from HIV/AIDS.
Forty-three countries surveyed in 2006 lost on average 0.5 of a percentage point from their economic growth rate every year between 1992 and 2004. Among them, the 31 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa lost 0.7 of a percentage point, according to the report.
Some 4.3 million people around the globe were newly infected in 2006, bringing the number living with the HIV virus to 39.5 million, an increase of 2.6 million from 2004, the UN agency leading the fight against HIV/AIDS said in its annual epidemic update last week.
Improved access to life-saving anti-retroviral drugs to treat the disease can most definitely have a beneficial impact on the labour force, the ILO report said.
"Assuming that treatment is initiated for all workers with advanced AIDS and each year new workers are added to the treatment pool, 2.5 million workers would be alive globally at the end of 2010 who would otherwise have died, if 80 percent of workers continue the treatment each year," it said.
This number would rise to 3.7 million if the percentage of workers continuing their treatment was 93 percent, it added.
Yet, such is the current scale of the AIDS pandemic and its projected growth rate, that even greater access to treatment on this scale would not significantly turn the tide, according to the ILO.
Even if a vaccine is developed, the "negative momentum of the epidemic" generated by existing HIV/AIDS infections is now so great that more than 70 percent of the labour force losses currently projected may still come about by 2020, the report predicted.
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