AIDSWEEKLY Plus; Monday, December 7, 1998
Daniel J. DeNoon, Senior Editor
And according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prvention (CDC), Americans of African descent are also disproportionately affected by HIV.
In a schizoid age where access to new drugs determines life or death, the vast extent of the African AIDS epidemic is a grim portent of things-to-come in Asia. There are 22.5 million HIV infected Africans.
Below the Sahara Desert - home to only 10 percent of the world population - occurred 80 percent of the world's 1998 AIDS deaths and 70 percent of the world's 1998 HIV transmissions. The numbers are mind boggling: 34 million people infected since the beginning of the epidemic; 11.5 million already dead.
An estimated 20 to 26 percent of 15- to 49-year-olds in the southern African nations of Botswana, Namibia, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe are living with HIV. In many areas of Zimbabwe up to half of all pregnant woman are infected. South Africa, host of the year 2000 World AIDS Conference, this year hosted one-seventh of new HIV infections on the African continent.
The devastation seen in Africa is a warning to Asia: a warning that went too long unheeded in India. Indian health authorities until recently believed the AIDS epidemic to have been confined to urban sex workers and drug users in isolated regions.
New data show these assumptions to have been deadly wrong: in rural areas, where 73 percent of India's population resides, HIV appears well established. Most troubling is data from 400 women attending sexually transmitted disease (STD) clinics in Pune, which show that 93 percent of these women were married and that 91 percent never had sex outside their marriages.
"All of these women were infected with a sexually transmitted disease and a shocking 13.6 percent of them tested positive for HIV," the UNAIDS/WHO report noted.
Eastern Europe and central Asia were late to the AIDS pandemic, but appear to be making up for lost time. Dramatic increases in STDs is an evil omen.
In North America and western Europe AIDS deaths continue to decrease due to the availability of highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART). But the proportion of people living with HIV continues to increase, and there has been no progress in reducing the rate of new infections.
The U.S. AIDS epidemic has become a disproportionate threat to black Americans, who according to the CDC are eight times more likely than whites to be HIV infected. National HIV prevalence among black males has reached 2 percent.
Worldwide, some 33.4 million people are living with HIV. Dazzling numbers such as these make it hard to remember that AIDS is a preventable disease. These are data that argue not for resignation, but for the will to make the difficult and sustained political choices required for effective prevention efforts.
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