United Press International - Monday, 10 July 2000
Michael Smith, UPI Science News

The development would mark the first time since the Black Plague that a disease has caused populations to shrink, according to Karen Stanecki of the U.S. Census Bureau, who analyzed the impact of the disease for USAID. The prediction is evidence of the speed of the global AIDS pandemic, Stanecki said during the first full day of the 13th International AIDS Conference.

"Two years ago, we did not estimate negative population growth," she said, adding that several other countries would have zero population growth because of the disease Stanecki said.

The population growth rate in Zimbabwe -- one of the worst-hit countries -- is zero, Stanecki said, where it would have been about 2 per cent a year without AIDS. By 2003, Zimbabwe will be losing 1 per cent of its population each year, she said. In the Caribbean and Latin America, she said, the pandemic was also reducing growth rates. The hardest-hit areas will likely be the Bahamas and Guyana, were growth rates will be reduced from about 1 per cent to about 0.4 per cent.

"It will take a long time for these populations to recover from the epidemic," Stanecki said.

The Black Plague began in Italy in 1347 and raged through Europe for several decades and claimed more than 100 million lives. In 1918 and 1919, an epidemic of influenza killed 25 million people worldwide, but Stanecki said that outbreak did not affect population growth rates in the same way as the Plague and AIDS.

"The take-home message is that we continue to underestimate this epidemic -- the scope of it, how rapidly it has moved from urban ro rural areas, the rapidity of the rise of the epidemic, particularly in southern Africa and Cambodia," said Paul Delay, chief of the HIV/AIDS Division of USAID.

"Most significantly, we have underestimated the severity," he said. "No one could have estimated five years ago that we would see countries with national prevalences of 35 per cent."

According to data released June 27 by the U.N. Joint Program on HIV/AIDS, 35.8 per cent of the people in Botswana are infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Several other African countries have rates of about 25 per cent.

Stanecki said Botswana is also an example of the speed of the epidemic: In 1991, the national rate was less than 10 per cent, but in some parts of the country now nearly half of the people are infected with HIV.

The USAID study predicted that many countries will see life expectancies fall to between 30 and 40 years, instead of between 50 and 60.

"These are life expectancies that would have been seen at the beginning of the 20th century, not the 21st century," Stanecki said.
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