The Sunday Times, South Africa - August 27, 1999
Olga Manda: Lusaka
In its first estimate, the health ministry said about 20 percent of all adult Zambians were HIV-positive, a figure confirmed last month by a survey conducted by UNAids.
Britain's The Economist magazine reported that one of the major causes of the frightening statistics was the "abject poverty" in which 80 percent of the population lived, making it difficult for them to afford medication.
A representative of the UN Children's Emergency Fund in Zambia, Peter McDermott, commented: "Only tycoons and Cabinet ministers can afford proper treatment."
The government's latest report said two thirds of the patients at a major hospital in the copper-mining region of northern Zambia had died of AIDS.
Those mostly affected were children who had lost both parents to the disease.
Estimates of the number of Zambian children under the age of 15 who have lost both or one parent range between 13 and 50 percent.
Paediatrician Chewe Luo, co-ordinator of the working group Motherto-Child Transmission, said 80 000 out of the 400 000 babies delivered every year were born HIV-positive.
Luo, a specialist at Zambia's main referral hospital, the University Teaching Hospital, disclosed the figure on receiving K78,4-million (about R200 000) from the Japanese government to buy equipment to be used in the testing of expectant mothers and their children.
She said her organisation would try to reduce the number of infant infections by 50 percent through the provision of the AIDS drug AZT to infected mothers.
The government report said, however, that good care of the children was difficult when so many adults were dying in their productive prime, leaving the very young and old to cope.
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