Inter Press Service - July 15, 1999
Lewis Machipisa

The life expectancy of Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe will be back down to the life expectancy of the 1960s, according to the 1999 Human Development Report of the UN Development Programme (UNDP). The other two are Kenya and Rwanda. The life expectancy in Zambia has dropped from 56 to 37 years.

According to the UN World Health Organisation (WHO) Regional Director for Africa, Dr. Ibrahim Samba, Africa has 70 percent of the people living with AIDS in the world, 83 percent of the AIDS deaths, and 95 percent of world's AIDS orphans.

More than half the children in Zambia have lost at least one parent to HIV/AIDS, giving the country of 9.5 million the world's highest concentration of AIDS orphans.

An estimated 600,000 Zambian children have lost one or both parents to the epidemic.

Ranked among the world's poorest nations, Zambia has a 20-percent HIV/AIDS infection rate. If this rate of infection continues, international aid groups say the number of orphans will increase in the next 20 years.

According to the Southern Africa Information Dissemination Services (SAfAIDS), between 35 and 40 percent of all children under 15 years old in Botswana, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe will have lost one or both parents in 20 years.

The vast majority of these children, between 85 and 95 percent, will have been orphaned through AIDS.

While AIDS in Southern Africa has become a critical factor for development, few serious attempts have been made to either deal with the socio-economic structures feeding into the epidemic to understand and minimise its socio-economic impact, according SAfAIDS, an NGO working to promote effective development responses to the AIDS epidemic in southern Africa.

The introduction of structural adjustments programmes (SAPs) reduced real budget allocations for health. In Zimbabwe, government's real recurrent per capita expenditure on health peaked in 1990-1991 at 3.20 US Dollars and declined to 2.10 US Dollars in 1993/1994, just barely above its 1980 level. It has since worsened.

Training costs to replace skilled workers in Zimbabwe were estimated at 2,500 US dollars per worker in 1993. Applying this average to the number of people with AIDS in the formal sector indicated that training costs would increase from one million US Dollars in 1991 to 5 million dollars in the year 2000.

More than 33 million people were living with HIV/AIDS at the end of 1998, 11 people are infected each minute, around the world, according to the WHO. AIDS causes 2.5 million deaths a year worldwide.

In Namibia, there is a prevalence of 20 percent among sexually active adults or one in five Namibians aged 15 to 49 years old. In 1997, AIDS was the number one killer of Namibians. But silence still surrounds the disease in the southern African nation.

Besides, the health system in most of the southern African countries has collapsed.

Even AZT, the most basic of AIDS drugs, is unaffordable in most African countries where 60 US dollars a month is considered good pay. The latest therapies for AIDS being used in industrialised countries cost 10,000 US dollars annually. This is many times more than the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of most African countries.

Most of the poor African countries spend next to nothing on AIDS and most rely on international support which is on a downward trend.

The problem has further been compounded by the stigma and discrimination against those suffering from AIDS or are HIV positive.

In South Africa's volatile KwaZulu-Natal province, a woman was stoned to death when she publicly admitted that she was HIV positive in December 1998.

"She was killed because she openly disclosed her status hoping that she could educate others. But the community stigmatised and discriminated against her and that resulted in her death," says Aulora Stally of SAFAIDS.

When hotel management in Kwazulu-Natal found out that some of the 27 AIDS activists attending a workshop at the hotel were HIV positive, they attempted to evict them.

According to the Sowetan newspaper in South Africa, hotel dining-room staff at Hluhluwe's Zulu Protea Hotel were instructed not to serve the activists together with other guests.

Despite having paid 27,000 Rand (4,400 US Dollars) to hold the workshop there, the AIDS activists had their cutlery and cooking utensils separated and meals served at different times in separate dining rooms in total obscurity from other hotel guests.

"There has to be more openness in communication regarding the disease," stresses Stally, media manager of SAfAIDS. "A lot of the time it's the messages that we come across and the perception that people have of HIV/AIDs e.g. the myth that you can get it from mosquito bites, sharing the same toilet seat, or cup."

"People should come up with ideas of how to accept AIDS openly," says Stally. "Journalists should not so much put the negative stuff in the press but also the positive or balance out the reporting. We have cases of some people who have lived for 15 years with HIV."

The WHO has urged Africa to declare the AIDS epidemic an emergency in the hope that the formal declaration will focus attention on the problem and help bring in additional international resources. (END/IPS/lm/mn/99)
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