Two-thirds of the 10-million people with HIV/Aids in sub-Saharan Africa are women and girls between the ages of 15 and 24 who are going to die, says United Nations Special Envoy for HIV/Aids in Africa, Stephen Lewis, reviewing the latest figures on HIV/Aids by the UN and the World Health Organisation.
Lewis told journalists in Johannesburg on Wednesday that Aids was depopulating parts of the continent of women. He described the pandemic as an assault on women.
The Aids Epidemic Update, released this week, shows that 19,2-million of 42-million people with HIV/Aids in the world are women and 3,2-million of them are children under the age of 15. Two million of the five million people infected with HIV this year were women and 800 000 were children. Of the 3,1-million people who died of Aids this year, 1,2-million were women and 610000 were children.
A regional analysis of sub-Saharan Africa showed it had the highest number of adults between the ages of 15 and 49 with HIV/Aids, at 29,4-million, as well as the highest percentage of HIV-positive women, at 58%.
But within these grim findings are signs of hope. For example, in South Africa HIV-prevalence rates among pregnant women under 20 have fallen from 21% in 1998 to 15,4% last year. Prevalence among young urban women in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, has also dropped and Uganda is proof that “the epidemic does yield to human intervention”, the report said.
But in Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland and Zimbabwe HIV-infection rates have rocketed to more than 30% of the adult population — “higher than thought possible”.
There is no end in sight to the rising toll on the continent, Lewis warned. “The worst years are yet to come. We are still on the threshold.” — Claire Keeton