Zimbabwe Slum Clearance May Worsen AIDS Epidemic, Doctors Say
July 6 (Bloomberg) -- Zimbabwe's demolition of what it says are informal dwellings and businesses may worsen the world's fourth-worst AIDS epidemic and breed resistance to anti-AIDS drugs, the Zimbabwe Association of Doctors for Human Rights said.
The program, which began mid-May, has left at least 323,000 people homeless, according to the Zimbabwe Human Rights NGO Forum. It has disrupted AIDS treatment programs, denying people access to anti-retroviral drugs and limiting home-based care and nutrition programs, the doctors' group said. AIDS is caused by the HIV virus.
This may lead to ``the inevitable emergence of widespread drug-resistant HIV as treatment programs are disrupted,'' the group said in an e-mailed statement yesterday. It could lead to ``the exacerbation of the HIV epidemic as community structures are fractured and dispersed and the vulnerability of women, adolescents and children to sexual exploitation is magnified.''
As of the end of 2003, 24.6 percent of Zimbabweans between the ages of 15 and 49, or 1.8 million people, carried the HIV virus, according to UNAIDS, the United Nations AIDS agency. That rate is exceeded only by Lesotho, Botswana and Swaziland.
Zimbabwe's ``Operation Murambatsvina,'' which means ``refuse dirt'' in the Shona language, was started to cut down urban crime, President Robert Mugabe's government says. The opposition says it's aimed at punishing its supporters as the opposition drew most of its backing from urban centers in March 31 general elections.
Clinic Bulldozed
In Hatcliffe, a slum north of the capital Harare, armed police accompanied bulldozers which destroyed an AIDS-care clinic, Hatcliffe Extension Clinic, and the premises of the Batsirai Childrens Centre, which cared for orphans, many affected by HIV, in the last week of May, Arnold Tsunga and Randu Nyamurundira, members of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights said in telephone interviews from Harare yesterday.
Some of the homeless are now held in temporary camps, which may lead to outbreaks of infectious diseases such as cholera and typhoid because of inadequate sanitation, the doctors' group said.
Deaths of children, the ill and the elderly may also result from hypothermia as the program is being implemented during Zimbabwe's winter and many people are now sleeping in the open, it said.
Malnutrition may also rise. Zimbabwe is suffering from its third consecutive year of famine after Mugabe began seizing white- owned commercial farms in 2000 for redistribution to black small- scale farmers deprived of land during white rule, slashing income from agricultural exports and turning the nation from a corn exporter to an importer.
The evictions have been condemned by U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair. The International Monetary Fund said they will worsen a recession that is in its sixth year. |
