UN Survey: "AIDS is Slashing Africa's Population"
-------------------------------------------------
New York Times article, October 28, 1998
By Youssef M. Ibrahim
UNITED NATIONS -- AIDS is cutting the life expectancy in many African
countries and will effectively reduce their populations within the next
10 to 15 years, according to a report to be released on Wednesday by
the Population Division of the United Nations.
The report, part of a world population survey for 1998, says AIDS has
achieved pandemic proportions in several of 34 sub-Saharan countries
where at least one in four people is infected with HIV, the virus that
causes AIDS.
In Botswana, the hardest hit country in sub-Saharan Africa, life expec-
tancy, which stood at 61 years only five years ago, has dropped to 47
years and is expected to drop further to 41 years between 2000 and
2005.
In Zimbabwe, where one of every five adults is infected with HIV, the
high mortality rate is significantly reducing the country's population
and its growth, from 3.3 percent a year between 1980 and 1985 to 1.4
percent now and a projection of less than 1 percent beginning in 2000.
Had it not been for the virus, Zimbabwe's population would have been
growing at a projected rate of 2.4 percent now.
"Of the 30 million persons in the world currently infected by HIV, 26
millions, or 86 percent, reside in these 34 countries. In addition, 91
percent of all AIDS deaths in the world have occurred in these 34 coun-
tries," the report said.
As the virus spreads through Africa, experts said it is changing the
demographic profile of the continent, the daily rhythm of life, and the
outlook for tens of million of people.
Experts also stress that AIDS is making its way through populous coun-
tries like India, China and Brazil where the huge populations result in
a faster spread of disease.
Most affected are young people between the ages of 10 and 24. Of the
estimated 7,000 daily infections around the world, half are occurring
in this age bracket, the report said.
Despite the enormity of the problems affecting Africa cited in the re-
port, the world's attention seems to have shifted from the disease,
largely because it seems to have been contained in advanced industrial-
ised nations.
"I don't think many people are aware of the scale," said Lester Brown,
president of World Watch Institute, a non-profit environmental group in
Washington that has studied the progression of AIDS around the world.
"This alters rather dramatically the population trends in Africa. In
some countries as much as 20 to 25 percent of the population is HIV
positive."
"In looking at global epidemics," Brown continued, "one has to go back
to the 16th-century and the introduction of small pox in the Aztec
population of what is now Mexico to find anything on that scale, and
before that to the bubonic plague in Europe in the 14th-century to see
that kind of heavy toll."
Experts like Brown and Carol Bellamy, executive director of the U.N.
Children's Fund, say that barring a miracle in the pharmaceutical in-
dustry that discovers radical remedies to AIDS, countries like Botswana
and Zimbabwe will loose as much s a fifth of their population within
the next decade.
Brown echoed the comments of other experts who have expressed alarm
that much of the developed industrialised countries of the West seem to
have shelved efforts to come to the aid of afflicted developing na-
tions.
Up until the World Health Organisation survey released in June in Ge-
neva, which sounded a earlier alarm, much of the data used by the
United Nations was provided by the governments of the affected coun-
tries, which often grossly understated the scale of infection because
they were worried it might interfere with tourism, for example, or out
of a nationalistic tendency to avoid the issue.
--
Send mail for the `AFRO-NETS' conference to `afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.
Mail administrative requests to `majordomo@usa.healthnet.org'.
For additional assistance, send mail to: `owner-afro-nets@usa.healthnet.org'.