JEREMY LOVELL, Cape Town | Friday
SOUTH African insurance experts believe that nearly half of South African adults risk becoming infected with HIV within the next decade unless ”drastic steps are taken now”.
”About 45% of adults will become infected with HIV/Aids unless there are significant changes in South Africa,” predicts Rob Dorrington, professor of actuarial studies at the University of Cape Town.
”We are really only at the beginning of the epidemic as far as actual Aids deaths are concerned,” Andre Ferreira, actuary at Sanlam Life, told the audience. ”This is a train smash that is going to happen.”
”South Africa has all the ingredients to make sure the HIV/Aids epidemic will be the most explosive of any country in the world,” added Dorrington.
Dorrington told the seventh annual meeting of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors that 13% of the country’s 42 million people would be carrying the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) by the end of this year.
This would see life expectancy drop to 41 years by 2010, down from the current 63 years. ”By then the chances of a 15-year-old dying before the age of 60 will have risen to 75%,” he said.
Dorrington blamed the former apartheid government for hopelessly mismanaging the epidemic from the outset, noting that it did not even allow advertising for condoms until 1992 – 10 years after the first Aids case was identified in the country.
He says by 2010 the infection rate will be running at between 2000 and 2500 people a day, and there will be 450000 people with Aids, which will have orphaned up to 150000 children during the year alone.
Furthermore, up to 250000 people will have died from Aids this year.
Andre Swanepoel, deputy chief executive of the national financial services industry watchdog, the Financial Services Board, told the meeting he expected there would be two million Aids orphans in South Africa by 2010.
He said 34 million people were infected with HIV worldwide, of whom 90% were in developing countries and 77% in sub-Saharan Africa. The disease would kill six million people in South Africa over the next decade, with major implications for crime and the economy, he added. – Reuters