- MBABANE (Reuters) - The tiny
African kingdom of Swaziland has acknowledged for the first time that it
has one of the highest AIDS rates in the world, with almost 40 percent
of Swazi adults now infected with the HIV virus.
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- Prime Minister Sibusiso Dlamini, in a New Year's address
printed in newspapers Thursday, said the country's official AIDS prevalence
rate had risen to 38.6 percent from 34.2 percent in January 2002.
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- "It is enormously disappointing that the education
and prevention initiatives of the past year have had so little effect,"
Dlamini said.
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- The new figure puts Swaziland just behind Botswana for
the highest AIDS prevalence rate in the world.
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- The latest United Nations estimates in early 2002 said
that Botswana had a 38.8 percent rate, Zimbabwe had a 33.7 percent rate
and the tiny kingdom of Lesotho 31 percent.
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- Swazi officials have traditionally been circumspect in
discussing the AIDS crisis in the country, which is also struggling with
severe food shortages that have left almost a quarter of its one million
people hungry.
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- Dlamini's speech cited AIDS statistics from an unreleased
health ministry report based on a 2001 survey of pregnant women and women
giving birth at government hospitals.
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- The data was used as a basis for determining the HIV
prevalence rate for the general adult population. Last January, a similar
study found a national infection rate of 34.2 percent.
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- Health officials have conceded that the actual prevalence
rate is probably higher. "The report is months old, and the figures
are probably out of date," one official told Reuters.
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- Dlamini promised that anti-retroviral drugs, the only
treatment available to slow the disease, would be available next month
at government hospitals to help prevent transmission of HIV from infected
mothers to their unborn children.
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- He acknowledged that AIDS deaths have cut the agricultural
workforce, worsening a food crisis brought on by crop failures last year.
Dlamini said starvation was occurring in parts of the country, something
the government has not said before.
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- Activists said they would await signs of concrete action
from the government, particularly on providing AIDS-fighting drugs, before
declaring that the country had turned a corner in its fight against the
disease.
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- Swaziland's population prior to the onset of AIDS was
projected to be 1.2 million in 2000. The population today is about 970,000,
with 20,000 HIV-positive Swazis developing full-blown AIDS annually.
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- A UNICEF report projects that by 2010 about 15 percent
of the population will be comprised of underage orphans who lost their
parents to AIDS.
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