ALLAN SECCOMBE, Johannesburg | Friday
SOUTH African mining firms are looking at a unified approach to tackle Aids, one of their biggest unresolved challenges as the infection rates creep higher.
Mining is a vital foreign exchange earner for South Africa, but about 20% of the industry’s some 400 000 workers are HIV positive. HIV leads to full-blown Aids and ultimately death. There is no cure for the epidemic.
South Africa’s second-largest gold miner, Gold Fields Ltd, reckons the disease will add between $4 and $10 an ounce to production costs at its mines where an estimated 26,5% of its 50 000 workers are infected.
Mining companies across the broad spectrum of precious and base metals, coal and valuable gems have run Aids awareness programmes for years, but the prevalence of the disease has still soared, prompting the industry to take a harder look at how better to tackle the epidemic on a united front.
”There is major concern at how the disease has unfolded in the industry…If one looks purely at the figures, they imply our programmes have not been as successful as they should be,” said Fazel Randera, a medical adviser to the Chamber of Mines.
”I don’t think the mining industry will be destroyed, but we do have an important problem in the industry and society on how to best deal with it,” said Randera.
The mining sector makes up about 40% of South Africa’s exports and at the end of the 1990s it contributed about 10% to the country’s gross domestic product.
AIDS RAVAGES SA
The first miners to test HIV positive were on a copper mine in 1989. Education and awareness campaigns started in 1986.
South Africa has more people than any other country living with HIV-Aids, with one in nine or some 4,5-million people infected, government statistics show.
Labour consultancy NMG-Levy said in an annual report on labour relations that some 30% of South Africa’s workforce will be HIV positive in 2005. By 2010 one million South Africans will be sick with Aids and six million more would have died of Aids-related illnesses.
NMG Levy director Andre Levy said South African companies were changing the way they looked at Aids.
”They previously saw it as primarily a human resource issue. Now they acknowledge that it is the single most important strategic issue facing South Africans,” he said.
South African mining giant Anglo American said recently it is halting its feasibility study on the provision of anti-retroviral drugs and would approach the chamber for a collective study. About 20% of Anglo’s South African workforce is HIV positive, it has said.
Randera said the chamber was already in the process of planning a feasibility study to distribute anti-retroviral drugs. The chamber’s health policy committee will present a proposal on the study to the chamber’s executive.
A decision to go ahead with the study could be made in a month, he said.
A cocktail of drugs will reduce the viral load in an HIV victim’s body and prolong their life.
The study will not consider the efficacy of the drugs, but will look at the cost and the best way to distribute them to about 80 000 infected miners. The study will have to win the backing of the trade unions and the government to be implemented, said Randera.
SINGLE-SEX HOSTELS
Gold mines, with their labour made up of migrant workers living in single-sex hostels, are particularly hard hit, whereas highly mechanised base metals mines with an educated workforce drawn from nearby communities were less threatened, said Nick Goodwin, a mining analyst at SG Securities.
Workers living far from their families are more likely to visit prostitutes and are more susceptible to catching HIV.
”Gold mines are making a lot of money at the moment from the gold price and the weak rand,” Goodwin said, adding that if the mining companies had to foot the bill, ”it’s no big deal.”
”Of the physical problems facing miners seismicity, safety, training and Aids Aids is the more serious of the bunch,” he added.
The government, led by President Thabo Mbeki who has questioned the causal link between HIV and Aids, has been reluctant to provide anti-retroviral drugs, saying it had doubts about their efficacy and that they may be toxic.
This was one of the reasons it has taken the mining industry so long to start formulating its own plans to distribute anti-retroviral drugs, said a mining analyst.
”Everyone was waiting for the government to do something about Aids and they haven’t really. Now the industry is looking at how they can take over the problem,” the analyst said.
The 250 000-strong National Union of Mineworkers said the mining houses should have adopted a united approach, drawn up a clear policy framework and dedicated a budget to combating Aids a long time ago.
”It is baffling why this industry has been sleeping this whole time. They could have dealt effectively with Aids years ago and put in more research and resources,” said NUM representative Moferefere Lekorotsoana.
The NUM wanted to see what the chamber’s new proposals were on combating Aids before committing to them, but it welcomed the unified industry approach.
The NUM has called for a summit of all industry roleplayers to discuss HIV-Aids, but no time has been set, he said. – Reuters