- South Africa's mortality rate has jumped by 59 per cent
in six years, fuelled by the HIV/Aids epidemic, according to new figures
published this weekend by the country's central statistical office.
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- The report, which has been mired in political controversy
even before its publication, says women have represented the biggest increase,
while more adults of both sexes now are dying than in 1997.
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- In 1997 149 men aged between 25 and 29 were dying for
every 100 deaths among women. In 2003 that figure had leapt to 77 male
deaths for every 100 female deaths.
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- The figures are based on a survey by the government agency
Statistics South Africa which analysed the cause of death of around three
million South Africans notified to the Department of Home Affairs between
1997 and 2003.
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- The poll is a potential bombshell in a country where
health professionals and the government have been locked in a bitter struggle
over the real scale of the HIV/Aids epidemic.
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- Although tuberculosis, influenza and pneumonia, and cerebrovascular
diseases were listed as the leading causes of death, the Statistician-General
Pali Lehohla, said on Friday that the data had 'provided indirect evidence
that the HIV/Aids epidemic in South Africa is raising the mortality levels
of prime-aged adults, in that associated diseases are on the increase'.
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- The release of the mortality figures was already controversial
even before their publication with claims that the statistics were being
suppressed by President Thabo Mbeki, who has long attempted to play down
the scale of the Aids crisis and who criticised the same agency in 2001
for the claim that 40 per cent of South Africans were HIV positive.
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- The report concluded that the average number of deaths
rose to 1,370 a day in 2002 from 870 in 1997, an increase that could not
be explained by the 10 per cent increase in population during the same
period. Dr Steve Andrews, an HIV clinician and consultant in Cape Town,
told the New York Times he believed the figures suggested that far from
the report having been made more politically palatable, 'we should not
be seeing this aggressive move in death rates - not at all'.
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- The new figures have emerged amid an escalating row over
the South African government's handling of HIV/Aids which forced the country's
Health Minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, to issue a statement maintaining
that South Africa's Aids policy is among the world's best.
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- 'Very few plans are as comprehensive as ours, bringing
together elements of prevention, nutrition and a variety of different treatments,'
Tshabalala-Msimang claimed. But the government target of having 53,000
people at 113 state-accredited health centres on free antiretroviral therapy
by March 2005 is still falling short. Recent figures from the Aids lobby
group, Treatment Action Campaign, indicate that only 29,332 people were
accessing the drugs.
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- The escalating Aids crisis - and claims that the government
is doing too little to stem the spread of the disease - has seen increasing
public discontent.
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- Last week Aids activists once again marched to parliament
to demand a ten-fold increase in the number of people being treated on
retroviral drugs by 2006.
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- Receiving the petition South Africa's presidential head
of communications, Murphy Morobe, said that he personally had lost six
family members to HIV/Aids over the past three years.
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- Morobe's remarks are in contrast to President Mbeki's
statement in 2003 that he 'did not personally know anyone who had died
from Aids'.
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- The latest official figures will put new pressure on
the president, following hard on research published earlier this year in
the journal Aids whose authors estimated that more than 112,000 people
died of HIV-related illnesses in 2000-01 alone - nearly three times the
figure given by South Africa's department of home affairs.
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- The country has been accused repeatedly of deliberately
underestimating the Aids death toll - and therefore failing to allocate
sufficient resources.
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- A 2002 survey by Statistics South Africa showed that
only 8.7 per cent of deaths in the country were caused by HIV/Aids.
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- But medical researchers and Aids charities insisted at
the time that it had massively downplayed the scale of the pandemic.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2005
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- http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,1418510,00.html
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