STEVEN SWINDELLS, Johannesburg | Wednesday
MAJOR South African mining firms have started to test miners anonymously for Aids in an attempt to come to terms with a disease that threatens to devastate their workforce.
The testing of miners’ saliva is expected to show that roughly a quarter of the country’s 500_000 miners are living with the disease and in the absence of expensive anti-Aids drugs will die, say health experts and economists.
Testing represents a breakthrough in often hostile union-employer labour relations which has prevented mining firms carrying out HIV tests on their workforces because of union objections on human rights grounds.
Miners are acutely vulnerable to HIV-Aids because they are often migrant workers far from loved ones, living in single-sex hostels that are surrounded by prostitutes.
Results of the testing, carried out by world platinum giant Anglo American Platinum with union agreement, will be completed by the year-end, according to company officials.
Whatever the results, the toll will be grim.
“We’re going to lose people to HIV-Aids,” said Anglo Platinum managing director Barry Davison.
The pool of data is likely to emerge as a vital tool for health planners and economists who are scrambling to come up with comprehensive responses to the disease.
Official South African Aids data, which estimates that one in ten, or 4.2 million, South Africans are living with the disease, is mainly based on a narrow test of pregnant women at antenatal clinics.
For the world’s biggest producer of gold and luxury metals such as platinum and palladium, infection rates of around 25% would have far-reaching effects on productivity, labour costs and their skills base.
The impact of Aids on Africa’s biggest economy is set to dominate the business environment over the next ten years, as the millions who contacted the virus as it spread in the 1990s lose their fight against the disease.
Economic consultancy WEFA Southern Africa estimates that more than four million semi and unskilled South African workers will be lost to the disease between 2010-15, with the biggest impact felt in the mining sector.
The Aids research division of Metropolitan Life estimates that costs for companies relating to medical aid, group life and disability could double by 2005.
An earlier study carried out by analysts Deutsche Securities and world number one gold producer AngloGold showed HIV infection rates as high as 33% at some of its South African operations. – Reuters
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