SCALE OF AFRICAN AIDS DISASTER

ECLIPSES WAR

IN this issue we deal extensively with wars-in-progress in Africa and around the globe. Now, if I published a forecast, based on impeccable, absolutely authoritative information, that an invading army would over the next few years wipe out millions of hapless, helpless South Africans you would very soon hear all about it. Contrast that with the generally ho-hum attitude to the wildly escalating AIDS pandemic now devastating huge areas of SA: testimony to the excruciating failure of Dr Nkosazana Zuma's pathetic anti-AIDS crusade.

Let's now turn to our worst hit area: the lovely but tragic garden province of KwaZulu-Natal. According to an as-yet unpublished government survey conducted among pregnant women at antenatal clinics there, one in three adults in KZN is now infected with the HIV virus, a rise of 20% in one year … the worst SA has ever seen.

Alan Smith, leader of the project, told a KZN symposium this month that the incidence of HIV in the province had risen from 26,9% in 1997 to 32,4% in 1998. Smith said the anti-AIDS campaign was "failing" and that millions of people would die in the next four to five years … but not, of course, before they pass the virus on to many others. In short, on all the evidence now coming in, not only is the pandemic as bad as once feared. It is a great deal worse.

What is more, we can safely assure you that those figures are but the tip of a very big iceberg. Promoting safe sex and condoms has not changed anything. What we face, with KZN just a short jump ahead of the rest of the country, is a picture of unremitting horror, frightening beyond belief.

The scourge is now beginning to incinerate SA's economy, destroy its families, is creating a generation of orphans, dramatically lowering life expectancy. UN forecasts predict that "more than a million" South Africans will die of AIDS before 2001, bringing life expectancy down from 68 years to 48 within the first decade of the millennium.

Nor is it just here. Right across the sub-continent

life expectancy is being slashed. In Botswana, where more than 25% of the adult population has HIV, children born early in the next decade will have a statistical life expectancy of just over 40 years. Without the AIDS crisis, that life span would be extended to 70 years. In Malawi AIDS has already cut average life expectancy from 51 to 37 years
.

Dr Peter Piot of the Geneva-based UN Aids Programme estimates HIV infection rates in Namibia, Swaziland and Zimbabwe hover between 20% and 25% of the adult population: and says it is not coincidental that the poorest continent is also the worst affected. But be warned. Those US figures, often based on old data, underplay the situation. In its 1998 AIDS report, the UN gave the rate of HIV infection in Harare as 25%. That, in fact, was the rate observed in pregnant women in 1990.

According to the British syndicated journalist Gwynne Dyer, by 1997 Zimbabwe's national rate of HIV infection had hit 40%. Last year a survey in antenatal clinics in southern Masingo province (a non-urban area) found that 67% of women there were HIV positive. About 750 Zimbabweans now die of AIDS every week.

Dyer notes that because the deaths are spread out in time the immediate impact of this plague is less visible than in the great plagues of the past. "But cumulatively, AIDS may actually hit Africa harder than when the Black Death struck Europe 650 years ago, when around one-third of the population died."

Dyer adds: "The UN report still talks conservatively about 'low population growth rates (cutting Zimbabwe's, for instance, from 3,3% annually in the 1980s to less than 1% by 2000)." Another recent report, Focus on HIV/AIDS in the Developing World, by Pete Wray and colleagues, forecasts an African population in 2010 that will be 71 million smaller than it would have been without AIDS. But the reality, as in 14th century Europe, may be an absolute fall in population, and perhaps a very steep one."