Bucking worldwide trend, AIDS not letting up in southern Africa
by Carole Landry Tue May 30, 11:48 AM ET
JOHANNESBURG (AFP) - AIDS in the countries of southern Africa, the world's worst affected region, is showing no signs of a letup, the UN AIDS agency said, blaming a failure of leadership for the lack of
While the incidence of new
HIV infections appears to be stabilising elsewhere in the world, southern Africa is still grappling with sky-high rates, according to the latest report on the global epidemic released on Tuesday.
"In this part of the world, we don't see this plateau taking place," said Mark Stirling, the UN AIDS director for eastern and southern Africa.
"What this suggests is a lack of political priority" attributed to fighting AIDS in the region, Stirling told a media briefing in Johannesburg.
"Every country that has not started to reverse its HIV infection rates needs to look at what they are doing," he said.
Southern Africa is home to 14.9 million people living with AIDS, or 38 percent of the worldwide total of 38.6 million people at the end of 2005.
South Africa alone has 5.5 million people infected with the virus, or 18.8 percent of adults.
The epicenter of the global pandemic is also grappling with the heaviest death toll from AIDS.
A total of 1.2 million out of the worldwide toll of 2.8 million people died from AIDS-related illnesses last year in southern Africa.
"Close to 50 percent of the global human loss from AIDS is within our region. This raises the question 'Are we doing enough?'," said Stirling.
A generation of AIDS orphans are growing up in southern Africa where 6.2 million children have lost one or both parents to the pandemic, representing 42 percent of the world's 15.2 million AIDS orphans at the end of 2005.
"We now have the critical mass of resources to act on HIV," said Stirling, pointing to the wealth of data, health care resources and experience that have developed over the pandemic's 25-year history.
"But we need to have much greater and stronger leadership in pushing the commitment forward."
"The leadership attention needed to make sure that commitments are met is not yet happening at the level and scale that is required," he said, declining to single out governments that were performing badly.
Amid much gloom in the region, Zimbabwe stood out as an AIDS success story, having reduced its HIV prevalence rates among adults from 25 percent in 2002 to 20 percent in 2005.
While the Zimbabwean health care system is in crisis due to the country's collapsing economy, prevention programs put in place in the early 1990s are now beginning to bear fruit, according to UN AIDS officials.
Condom use is among the highest in the region and sexual behaviour has changed in favour of faithfulness, according to Karl Dehne,
UNAIDS coordinator for Zimbabwe.
"Zimbabwe has done quite well in prevention, but there are great difficulties with treatment," said Dehne.
Topping the list of AIDS hotspots in southern Africa is Swaziland, the kingdom wedged between South Africa and Mozambique, where 33.4 percent of adults are living with HIV in the nation of 1.1 million.
Close to one in four adults in Botswana, or 24.1 percent of adults, is infected with HIV, followed closely by Lesotho where 23.2 percent of adults are living with the virus.
Namibia's HIV infection rate is close to that of Zimbabwe, at 19.6 percent.
Zambia, Mozambique and Malawi are all struggling with prevalence rates of between 17 and 14.1 percent. |
