-
- JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - In Botswana,
one out of every three adults is HIV-positive or has full-blown AIDS.
-
- In the South African city of Durban, where more than
11,000 delegates will meet Sunday at the start of the 13th biennial world
conference on AIDS with no cure yet in sight, people used to spend Saturday
afternoons watching football matches.
-
- Now, many spend their weekends at funeral parlours and
cemeteries.
-
- In South Africa, two out of every three soldiers are
infected.
-
- In Malawi, average life expectancy is down to 37.
-
- "About three years ago, nobody knew of anyone dying
of AIDS. Now that people are starting to drop dead, the realisation is
dawning," Botsalo Ntuane, executive secretary of Botswana's ruling
party, told AFP recently.
-
- That statement starkly indicated the state of denial
-- and increase in the number of deaths -- in southern Africa, where most
people hide the disease and death certificates give the immediate cause,
such as tuberculosis.
-
- The figures, from the UN agency UNAIDS, show that in
sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, 24.5 million people are infected -- more
than 70 percent of the world total of 34.3 million -- and that AIDS has
orphaned more than 12 million African children, 95 percent of the world's
total.
-
- But it is southern Africa which is bearing the brunt,
as the mind-numbing statistics show: in Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Lesotho,
about one in four adults is infected; In South Africa, Zambia and Namibia
and Zambia, about one in five; in Malawi, one in six.
-
- In Zimbabwe, average life-expectancy should be 65; AIDS
has slashed that by 26 years -- a Zimbabwean born now can expect to die
at the age of 39.
-
- The pandemic is crippling businesses and civil services,
with workers dying as they approach senior positions, creating poverty
in the countryside, and wrecking education -- Africa's long-term hope --
as those who take AIDS orphans under their wings cannot afford to pay for
their education as well as that of their own children. Many teachers are
dying, too.
-
- Armed forces are particularly vulnerable -- and particularly
likely to spread the disease.
-
- Vigorous education programmes have been slow to get off
the ground in southern Africa, though they have been shown to work in other
African countries, notably Senegal and Uganda, overcoming taboos and misconceptions.
-
- The cost of the expensive antiretroviral cocktails used
in developed countries is beyond the means of governments and individuals
in Africa.
-
- South Africa wants to use generic or home-produced retrovirals,
but is stumped at the moment by a High Court challenge from pharmaceutical
companies.
-
- The 14-nation Southern African Development Community
is negotiating reduced prices and assured supplies and training from major
companies, but victims continue to die in the meantime.
-
- The reaction of some southern African leaders has flabbergasted
the mainstream medical community.
-
- South African President Thabo Mbeki, seeking an "African
solution" to the problem, set up an advisory panel in April and appointed
among its members dissident scientists who argue that HIV does not cause
AIDS, or does not even exist.
-
- President Sam Nujoma of Namibia told a conference in
Geneva last month that AIDS was created as a biological weapon and launched
by countries he did not name.
-
- South African Deputy President Jacob Zuma, on the other
hand, called recently on southern African countries to stop considering
HIV/AIDS as a "foreign" disease, and to accept that "umthakathi
usekhaya", a Zulu expression meaning "the witch is in the home."
-
- "We will not succeed in fighting this disease for
as long as we refuse to accept reality. We will continue to perish in even
larger numbers," he warned.
-
-
-
- MainPage
http://www.rense.com
-
-
-
- This
Site Served by TheHostPros
|