AIDS Plunges Life Expectancy Below 35 In African Countries
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Source U.N.Wire
http://www.unwire.org/UNWire/20040714/449_25824.asp
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
The AIDS pandemic has reduced life expectancy in some African
countries to below 35 years, undermining development gains made
in the last decade, the United Nations said today at the 15th
International AIDS Conference in Bangkok:
http://www.aids2004.org/
Thirteen sub-Saharan African nations have recorded "dramatic re-
versals" in human development since 1990, largely due to the
disease, the U.N. Development Program said in a statement.
Seven of those countries now have life expectancies under 40
years, worst among them Zambia, where a child born today can ex-
pect to live just 32.7 years � down from 47.4 in 1990. The coun-
try's HIV-infection rate among adults is 16.5 percent.
Life expectancy in Zimbabwe, where 25 percent of people have the
disease, has dropped from 56.6 years in 1990 to 33.9 years in
2002, and in Swaziland, which has an HIV-infection rate of 38.8
percent, from 55.3 to 35.7 years.
The Central African Republic, Lesotho, Mozambique and Malawi
were also among the countries with life expectancies below 40.
"In all these countries, AIDS is reversing the hard-won develop-
ment gains of recent decades," said Elizabeth Lwanga, deputy di-
rector of UNDP's regional bureau for Africa. "We need an un-
precedented and holistic response to this crisis, which is tak-
ing a devastating toll on our communities, and on the capacity
of our public institutions" (Agence France-Presse/News24.com,
July 14).
http://www.news24.com/News24/Africa/News/0,,2-11-1447_1557260,00.html
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U.S., Facing Widespread Criticism, Calls For Unity To Combat
HIV/AIDS
The United States, which has come under attack at the conference
for nearly every aspect of its AIDS policy, urged its detractors
to step back from debates about condoms and patents and come to-
gether in fighting the disease.
"At this point, perhaps the most critical mistake we can make is
to allow the pandemic to divide us," U.S. AIDS coordinator Ran-
dall Tobias told the conference. "We are striving toward the
same goal � a world free of HIV/AIDS. When 8,000 lives are lost
to AIDS every day, division is a luxury we cannot afford."
Tobias also defended the Bush administration's record of spend-
ing on AIDS, which has amounted to nearly twice as much as the
rest of the world's donor governments combined (Associated
Press/Globe and Mail, July 14).
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20040714.waids0714/BNStory/International/
For more coverage of the conference, go to:
http://www.kaisernetwork.org/aids2004/kffsyndication.asp?show=portal.html