Inter Press Service - November 23, 1999
Lewis Machipisa

The report, the 1999 AIDS Epidemic Update, says in sub-Saharan Africa, which remains the global epicentre of the epidemic, new evidence shows that for the first time women infected with HIV outnumber men by two million.

"Ten years ago, it was hard to make people listen when we were saying AIDS wasn't just a man's disease", said Dr Piot, executive director of UNAIDS. "Today, we see the evidence of the terrible burden women now carry in Africa's epidemic."

According to the report, released in advance of World AIDS Day, commemorated each year on Dec 1, 55 percent of infected adults in sub-Saharan Africa are women, which means more than six HIV- positive women for every five HIV-positive men.

And it is mostly elderly men who are responsible for the horrendous figures of an estimated 12.2 million African women and 10.1 million African men aged 15-49 living with HIV at the end of 1999.

Through the practice known as the "Sugar Daddy" syndrome , young African girls aged 15-19 years are five to six times more likely to be HIV-positive than boys the same age.

"Ease of male-to-female sexual transmission, and sex with older, infected men appear to be contributing factors to girls' greater vulnerability to HIV," says the report.

Despite intensified HIV/AIDS prevention methods, more public awareness of the killer disease, AIDS is not losing momentum.

The report also shows that HIV has infected 50 million, of whom more than 33 million are still alive and over 16 million have died, since the epidemic began.

AIDS deaths reached a record 2.6 million this year, it says, and that new HIV infections continued unabated, with an estimated 5.6 million adults and children worldwide becoming infected in 1999.

"With an epidemic of this scale, every new infection adds to the ripple effect, impacting families, communities, households and increasingly, businesses and economies. AIDS has emerged as the single greatest threat to development in many countries of the world", noted Piot.

For example, South Africa, which had no reported HIV positive blood specimen in 1989, had 0.6 percent of its sexually active population carrying the HIV virus that causes AIDS, by 1991. By 1998, more than 22 percent were HIV positive.

"That is nothing short of a catastrophe," says Salim Abdool Karim, Head of the AIDS Research Programme in South Africa. "We know of no disease that has exploded like this in human kind."

"The epidemic has, however, not reached its maximum destruction levels in South Africa," he says.

Life expectancy at birth in southern Africa, which climbed from 44 in the early 1950s to 59 in the early 1990s, is expected to drop back to 45 sometime between 2005 and 2010.

UN Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that fewer than 50 percent of South Africans currently alive can expect to reach the age of 60, compared with an average of 70 percent for all developing countries and 90 percent for industrialized countries.

There is mounting testament of the epidemic's impact on the educational and health care sectors. A World Bank study in Tanzania estimated that AIDS would kill almost 15,000 teachers by the year 2010 and 27,000 by the year 2020.

Training replacement teachers would cost about 37.8 million US Dollars. Similar stories are being told in many nations across Africa. It is estimated, for example, that by 2005 Kenya's gross domestic product (GDP) will be 15 smaller than it would have been without AIDS.

In the hardest hit countries the highcost of AIDS treatment is already absorbing a large percentage of public health budgets, 79 percent in the case of Uganda, for example.

In some parts of Africa, AIDS has reduced life expectancy to levels not seen since the 1980s. Today, a child born in a high HIV prevalence country can expect to live on average only 43 years without AIDS.

It is further estimated that by 2005, AIDS costs will represent more than half of Kenya's government health spending and nearly two-thirds of government health spending in Zimbabwe.

The report notes that illness and death have already replaced old-age retirement as the leading reason why employees leave service in commercial farms in Kenya.(END/IPS/lm/mn/99)
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