HUGH NEVILL, Johannesburg | Sunday
AIDS has killed some 15 million people in Africa over the past 20 years, and more than 25 million Africans are HIV-positive, according to the UN agency UNAIDS.
APOLOGIES Due to unforeseen technical difficulties, this page will not be properly updated on Monday 4 June. Normal service will be resumed on Tuesday. Our thanks for your forbearance. In Botswana, more than a third of all adults are infected; in the other worst-hit countries, it is one in four adults, or one in five.
But those figures come from official calculations, and South African President Thabo Mbeki warned when he opened an international Aids Conference in Durban last year that if African nations were able to gather accurate statistics “our morbidity and mortality figures would tell a story that would truly be too frightening to contemplate”.
Up to 95% of people infected with the HIV virus in developing countries probably do not know they are carriers, UNAIDS executive director Peter Piot said last week.
“Where we will be in over 20 years depends entirely on how we respond to the epidemic today,” he said.
Measures to combat the pandemic are finally intensifying in Africa as governments and organisations work to overcome taboos, myths, and the stigma which means that Aids is often hidden.
The UNAIDS figures show that despite the high incidence of Aids south of the Sahara Desert, the rate is fewer than one in 100 in Muslim north Africa.
The African sufferers – 70% of the global total – are dying at such a rate – in the absence of expensive drug cocktails which have reduced Aids to a chronic disease in the west – that cemeteries are filling up. In South Africa, officials are mulling the possibility of burying bodies vertically.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organisation said last month that deaths caused by HIV/Aids in the 10 hardest-hit African countries could cut their rural workforce by a quarter by 2020.
Since 1985, some seven million agricultural workers have died from Aids-related diseases in 24 African countries and some 16 million deaths are feared in the next two decades, it said.
More than 12 million children in sub-Saharan Africa – equivalent to every child in Britain under the age of 15 – have been orphaned by Aids, according to a report last month by the British charity Christian Aid.
By 2010, that figure will have risen to 43 million children, by which time the virus will have cost the South African economy alone more than $22 billion, it warned.
There are some bright spots: – international drug companies are offering a number of drugs free, or at greatly reduced prices, and they withdrew from a landmark court case against South Africa in April, allowing the government to import cheap copies of antiretroviral drugs, or manufacture them.
In Abuja, some 50 heads of state vowed at the end of an Aids summit on April 27 to reserve at least 15 % of their annual budgets for healthcare and to lift tariff barriers on Aids-related programmes.
Countries such as Uganda and Senegal with strong awareness programmes are reducing the spread of the disease.
A global fund being set up to fight Aids, malaria and tuberculosis has won pledges of $200 million from the United States, $127 million from France, $100 million from the International Olympic Committee, and $100 million from UN Secretary General Kofi Annan.
But leading South African AIDS researcher Hooven Coovadia described such contributions as “peanuts”, and a UN study says Africa needs annual aid of between two and $10 billion to counter the scourge. – AFP