The Bay Area Reporter - November 23, 2000
S. Predrag

Last year alone, AIDS killed 2.6 million people from all over the world, but close to 90 percent of these deaths occurred in Africa; mostly in the Southern African countries.

Many experts believe that Botswana is the worst-affected country on this continent. The UNAIDS agency claims that 25 percent of men and women in Botswana, which has a total population of about 1.5 million people, have already been affected by the deadly virus.

Joy Phumaphi, Botswana's minister of health, admitted last weekend that the life expectancy in Botswana had dropped from 67 years to 45 years. "The stigma created around the disease [AIDS] is even bigger than the epidemic itself," Phumaphi said.

AIDS is still stigmatized in many African countries where people find it easier and more acceptable to lie and say that their family member died of malaria, tuberculosis, or any other illness, but not AIDS.

The executive director of UNAIDS, Dr. Peter Piot, has repeatedly warned that the AIDS stigma "is alive and powerful ... [and] ... the impact that AIDS is already having on sub-Saharan Africa is catastrophic, and the scenario could only worsen."

Although Africa is home to just 10 percent of the world's population, it has the dubious honor of being home to 24 million out of 34 million HIV-infected people throughout the world. To make matters worse, this is just an official estimate -- many analysts believe that even this figure is conservative because in South Africa alone the number of HIV-infected people is fast-increasing, with 1,700 new cases being reported every day.

Just recently, for the very first time, Nigeria (with over 100 million inhabitants) disclosed that it is recording a new HIV infection every minute. This has come as a huge shock to many Nigerians who, for years now, have been under the illusion that AIDS had somehow magically overlooked their country.

Zimbabwe, with its population of 12 million people, is not lagging far behind Botswana. Nearly one in four adults are HIV-infected. In Zambia and Namibia the figure is one in five, one in seven in Kenya, and one in eight in South Africa.

AIDS has reduced the life expectancy in certain African countries by about 20 years. For example, a child born in an African country with a high AIDS rate can expect to live, on average, only 43 years. On the other hand, in earlier times, when AIDS was not raging out of control, a child born in South Africa or Zimbabwe could have expected to live up to 60 or 65 years old.

Uganda: A rare example

Uganda is a positive, although rare, example of an African country which has managed to reduce its number of HIV infections as a result of years of intensive AIDS awareness campaigns which enjoyed massive government and international support. The HIV infection rate in Uganda has declined from 13 percent in 1994 to less than 10 percent last year.

However, it is taking an inexplicably long time to break through the wall of silence surrounding AIDS.

At the 13th International AIDS Conference, held in July in Durban, South Africa, many experts warned that massive awareness campaigns were badly needed to shatter the taboos posed by culture and tradition in many African countries. AIDS is here to stay -- the scientists warned in their wake-up call to African leaders.

Unfortunately for many AIDS activists, researchers, and those living with the disease, South African President Thabo Mbeki used the Durban conference to question -- yet again -- the mainstream scientific view that HIV causes AIDS. He sided with dissident AIDS scientists who claim that other factors, including poverty and malnutrition, play an important role.

This controversial stand is already harming the battle against AIDS in certain African countries, experts said. Especially since, in the absence of an anti-AIDS vaccine and cheap drugs, this continent with more than 800 million people has a slim chance of stopping the spread of AIDS without massive awareness campaigns.
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