Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.
Daily Mail & Guardian - Johannesburg, South Africa. March 14 2000
Victoria Brittain
This extraordinary statistic includes wars in Angola, Sierra Leone, Congo, Congo-Brazzaville, Somalia, Sudan, Ethiopia and Eritrea.
"Aids is a major crisis for the continent, governments have got to do something. We must end the conspiracy of silence, the shame over this issue," Mr Annan said, revealing that he has ordered a major UN study on Aids in Africa, which will be completed by May.
In answer to a question, he said the study would "probably" be published, but he is likely to encounter resistance from regional leaders.
Mr Annan is in London to deliver the annual Commonwealth lecture tonight and is also scheduled to meet Tony Blair and Robin Cook.
Some African leaders have begun to speak about Aids, Mr Annan said, but most are still reluctant to confront it.
"If I say that we must get people to use condoms, I find I'm said to be encouraging people to be promiscuous - this won't do," Mr Annan said. The only African leader who regularly raises the issue and calls for a change in sexual habits is President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, where dire rates of infection have improved as a result.
Of the world's 36m Aids sufferers, 23m live in sub-Saharan Africa. "None of us has yet begun to grasp the full impact of this horror - on the quality of life in Africa, its economic potential and its social and political stability," Mr Annan said.
He cited Ivory Coast, where a teacher dies of Aids every schoolday, and of Botswana, where a child born today has a life expectancy of 41 years whereas, without Aids, they would have been expected to live to 70.
In Zimbabwe government projections show that by 2005 HIV and Aids will consume 60% of the health budget, and even that will fall far short.
Aids permeates the military and police to such an extent that neither group can be used as blood donors. But, as in Malawi and Zambia where infection rates are extremely high, the subject is taboo.
In South Africa Nelson Mandela and his wife Graca Machel have broken the silence on the disease, but Aids sufferers are still shunned.
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