United Press International - Sunday, July 7, 2002
Ed Susman, UPI Science News

At the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Spain, U.S. Census Bureau researchers said their analyses found that life expectancy is less than 40 years in seven African nations -- levels not seen since the end of the 19th Century.

"In 2002 the life expectancy of a person living in Botswana is 39 years, but without the AIDS impact the life expectancy in that African country would be 72 years," said Karen Stanecki, chief of the Health Studies Branch of the Bureau of the Census, Washington, DC.

And, she said, the situation will get worse by the end of the decade. By 2010, Stanecki said, life expectancy will be just 27 years for a person in Botswana, compared to 74.4 years if the AIDS epidemic did not exist. In Botswana 39 percent of adults are infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the organism that causes AIDS.

Stanecki said that the loss of life expectancy occurs because AIDS kills people in mid-life and it kills infants and children before they reach the age of 5, reducing the average years a person lives.

"In 2010, about 80 percent of the deaths of children under the age of 5 in Botswana will be due to AIDS," she said. "By 2010 more children in Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Namibia and South Africa will die from AIDS than because of any other cause."

She said the analyses indicate that the population in Botswana is already declining, and that by 2010 negative population growth also will be seen in South Africa, Mozambique, Lesotho and Swaziland.

Dr. Anne Peterson, assistant administrator for the Bureau for Global Health of the U.S. Agency for International Development, said her agency funded the Census Bureau report and other AIDS surveillance and monitoring projects around the world because "we cannot afford to underestimate again what will happen with this epidemic."

Peterson said that previous estimates of the extent of the epidemic did not anticipate infection rates that exceeded 30 percent of the population, as is the case in Botswana. The infection rate exceeds 20 percent in Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. More than 10 percent of adult populations are infected with HIV in Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Kenya, Malawi and Mozambique.

Stanecki said that in the Caribbean there are also disturbing reductions in life expectancy. In Haiti, the life expectancy today is 51 years, she said, but without the impact of AIDS that life expectancy would be 59.

She said that the life expectancy of people who are not infected with HIV in Botswana would also be negatively affected "due to the degeneration of public infrastructure and the health care system."

"There are going to be countries that will become unstable due to this disease," said U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson, speaking at a press briefing in Barcelona on U.S. support of international AIDS programs. He suggested that such destabilized countries could become terrorist havens if the disease cannot be controlled.

Stanecki said the researchers used a middle ground approach in their analysis. "These projections," she said, "are not a worst case scenario."
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