Fighting AIDS, Hard Job for Africa

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, November 28, 2002

Fighting AIDS, Hard Job for Africa

Africa, which suffers the most from the HIV/AIDS in the world, realizes that it has to give more attention to the disease, but the combating job is hard.

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Africa, which suffers the most from the HIV/AIDS in the world, realizes that it has to give more attention to the disease, but the combating job is hard.

According to the latest statistics released by the United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), Africa, which has only 10 percent of the world's resources, has 29.4 million people living with HIV/AIDS, accounting for 70 percent of the total 42 million infected in the whole world at present.

In sub-Saharan Africa, people from all walks of life find it hard to escape from the threat of the infection of AIDS, which hasso far killed 7 million agricultural workers since 1995, the United Nations' top adviser on AIDS in Africa Stephen Lewis said on Nov. 27.

The disease, which has reduced life expectancy in Africa by up to 20 years, has overtaken armed conflicts as the number one killer in the region.

Of the nine countries suffering a 17-year loss in life expectancy as a result of HIV/AIDS, seven are in southern Africa.

Life expectancy in Botswana, whose AIDS infection rate stands at 38.8 percent, has decreased to 39 -- the lowest since 1940.

Other southern African countries -- Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia,South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe, will also be back down to that of the 1960s, said UNAIDS.

The rapid spread of AIDS has also incurred heavy economic losses to the continent, which is torn by conflicts and poverty.

The labor force in Africa has been dramatically weakened, with the sub-Sahara countries the hardest hit.

The 14-member Southern African Development Community (SADC) hasthe world's fastest-accelerating AIDS rate and is confronting debilitating human and economic devastation with 10 percent of itsworkforce infected.

In some countries, the workforce has been cut by half and UNAIDS predicted that it will continue to reduce by another 25 percent in these countries by the year 2020.

A senior official of the World Health Organization (WHO) told world AIDS conference held in Spain in July that more 20 percent of the adults in some southern African countries are infected people and if this trend is not checked, some 25 percent of workforce in these countries will be lost in the next 20 years.

Meanwhile, due to the infection of some government officials, some African countries also suffered the loss of national finance.In Kenya, 75 percent of the death of policemen is caused by AIDS.

Already staggering under heavy debt, African countries are now shouldering another heavy burden -- the medical cost for AIDS cases.

Africa as a whole has already devoted more than one billion US dollars to medical treatment of HIV/AIDS patients. By 2005, some African countries, like Kenya and Zimbabwe, will allocate half of their health budget to cover the expenses for the AIDS patients.

In sub-Sahara, each infected individual will also have to shoulder up to 30 US dollars of medical fee for treatment every year. But the problem is that in these countries, the public healthcare fee for each person only stands at 10 US dollars.

However, realizing the disaster brought up by HIV/AIDS, Africancountries have begun to mobilize themselves to combat the disease.Uganda has set a good example of containing the disease.

The landlocked African country, whose infection rate stood the highest in the world in 1990s, has successfully controlled the spread of AIDS, reducing rate from 8.3 percent in 1999 to the current 5 percent.

While the infection rates in some countries continue to increase, Uganda has been decreasing its rate during the past eight years, which means that the epidemic could be taken under control, said a recent report by UNAIDS.

As for the reasons, an AIDS expert pointed to the social recognition.

"In Uganda, people accept HIV infectors, from the individual level to the government level, and they did very very well in dealing with the culture of denial (of HIV/AIDS)," Dr. Joshua Kimani, field director of the WHO Collaborative Center for STD/HIVResearch in Kenya, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

More awareness of HIV/AIDS in the society through health education will help a lot in the fight against the epidemic, whichis really a hard and long-term job, Kimani added.

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