Sunday Times, South Africa - September 26, 1999
Cornia Pretorius
Experts warn it will worsen the projected shortage of teachers, affect their ability to teach, increase infection rates among pupils, change enrolment patterns and generally disrupt schooling because of erratic attendance rates as teachers and pupils take time to care for family members with AIDS.
Mary Crewe, head of the AIDS Unit at the University of Pretoria, said experience in other African countries showed a high infection rate among teachers.
She estimates teachers infection rate at 12 percent -- in line with the 1998 South Africa Human Development Report, which stated that up to 15 percent of the civil service was HIV-positive.
Crewe said that at colleges in some African countries 25 percent more teachers were being trained than were needed. This was because by the time the training was finished, a significant number of the student teachers would be too ill to work, would have died, or would be expected to die in the first five years of teaching.
The new HIV/AIDS policy forbids sex between teachers and pupils, as there are fears that this could further increase the infection rate.
Many teachers have recognised their risk of HIV infection and, as a consequence, are seeking out younger and younger partners, Crewe said.
However, the highest infection rate is among young women aged 16 to 26. At Africas largest HIV/AIDS conference, held in Zambia last week, Carol Bellamy , executive director of Unicef said that one in four adolescent women south of the Sahara did not know were unaware of even one effective way of avoiding infection.
At the conference it was suggested that the age of five to 15 provided a window of hope within which schools needed to teach children survival skills.
Crewe said HIV/AIDS should become an examinable school subject.
In the HIV/AIDS policy, schools are given the option to distribute condoms -- at the discretion of the school community. But experts warn that this could hamper prevention efforts as many schools are too conservative to take such steps.
Crewe said: Moral objections to condoms undermines the educational message We cant tell young people to use condoms if they are sexually active, and then tell them that we cannot provide them.
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