Important note: Information in this article was accurate in 2000. The state of the art may have changed since the publication date.

Reuters NewMedia - Friday December 1, 2000
Paul Busharizi

"I am badly off, any help at all I will take. Money, food anything," Nalule said. "The family will end with us if we do not get help."

The children -- three boys and five girls -- were orphaned four years ago by AIDS which killed Nalule's three sisters and their husbands.

They are among the more than 900,000 Ugandans who have succumbed to the disease and were remembered on Friday by government dignitaries including the head of the U.N.'s AIDS agency, Dr Peter Piot.

The epidemic has dearly cost Uganda, although the tide of infection appears to have been turned by a determined drive to educate Ugandans about the dangers of unprotected sex.

Officials say some 1.1 million children below the age of 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS and the life expectancy of economically productive Ugandans dropped from 48 in 1990 to 38 by 1997.

Nalule's story is repeated many times across Rakai -- the epicenter of Uganda's AIDS epidemic in the 1980s.

The southern district reported Uganda's first AIDS cases in 1982. By the time it was identified, "Slim," as it came to be known for the way it emaciated its victims, had cut a deadly swathe, felling male, female and children indiscriminately.

The common theory is that the disease was brought by Tanzanian forces in 1979 when they marched through Rakai district -- which borders northern Tanzania, on their way to Kampala to overthrow dictator Idi Amin.

"That's the most feasible theory," a Rakai-based AIDS researcher, Dr David Serwada, told Reuters. "Even in the neighboring Kagera district in Tanzania, the highest prevalence rates have been recorded."

The main road from Kampala to Mutukula on the Tanzanian border is supposed to have played its part, bringing with it truck drivers who sated themselves in the dingy lodges that line the road in Rakai town.

Rakai, Like Uganda Has Transformed

But Rakai is no longer a no-go area. Like the rest of Uganda, a determined public campaign to change sexual behavior has begun to pay dividends. Nationwide, the rate of HIV infection has dropped by as much as 50 percent, health ministry statistics show. Still, some 1.7 million people are living with HIV/AIDS in Uganda.

"In the late 80s and early 90s when Uganda was the epicenter of HIV/AIDS, the sero-prevalence (infection) rate (among adults) was as high as 30 percent," Prime Minister Apollo Nsibambi said on Friday. "But at the end of 1999 sero-prevalence in the adult population was down to 8.3 percent."

In Rakai the rate of HIV prevalence among the 450,000 population is down 30 percent to 11.6 percent in 2000 from 16.9 percent in 1995.

"Factors such as death and migration played a part in this result but that notwithstanding, the HIV infection rates are declining in the district," Dr Serwada said.

But health officials are worried that the success they have recorded could lead to complacency.

Official after official at the ceremony exhorted the population to remain on guard against the killer disease.

"Talk about it everywhere. No function or meeting should pass without a word on AIDS," health minister Dr. Crispus Kiyonga said. "The fight is not over. There is still a long way to go."
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