AIDS TO CUT AFRICA LIFE EXPECTANCY TO UNDER 30. Life expectancies in some African countries will soon drop below age 30 because of the staggering number of AIDS deaths, experts said Monday at the 13th International AIDS conference in Durban, South Africa, the Los Angeles Times (p. A10) reports. And for perhaps the first time in their history, some nations in southern Africa will experience negative population growth as a result of AIDS, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The epidemic in Africa is the continent's "worst social catastrophe since slavery," Dr. Kevin DeCock of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is quoted as saying. Nearly three-quarters of the 34 million people living with AIDS reside in sub-Saharan Africa, and deaths are increasing at a rate that scientists would have found incomprehensible only a few years ago.
Since the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, 11.5 million people have died of the disease in sub-Saharan Africa. About 5,500 now die of AIDS everyday, but researchers predict that about 13,000 will die daily by 2010. AIDS now accounts for 21 percent of all deaths in the region, with malaria a distant second at 9.1 percent. As the death rate rises, the average life expectancy will fall sharply, said epidemiologist Karen Stanecki of the census bureau. "It's hard to comprehend the amount of mortality we will see in those countries," she said at a Monday news conference.
Meanwhile, South Africa's response to the AIDS crisis came under withering attack yesterday, when a Supreme Court judge, himself carrying the virus, accused his government of "mismanaging the epidemic at almost every turn," the Financial Times (p.22) reports. In a speech at the world AIDS conference in Durban, Edwin Cameron, one of the few high-profile South Africans to reveal that he is HIV-positive, said the government's failure to act had resulted in the highest and fastest infection rate in the world. The lack of response was "irresponsibility that borders on criminality," he said.
About four million people, 10 percent of South Africans, are infected, notes the story, with 320,000 of them having been infected this year. Almost all will die because anti-retroviral therapy-the use of cocktails of anti-HIV drugs commonly prescribed in the West-is extremely rare. The South African government, accused of virtually ignoring the crisis and keen to pursue an "African solution", backed what turned out to be a useless local drug, Virodene. It has also resisted expert advice to use AZT, a relatively cheap HIV medicine, to treat pregnant women and rape victims.
The story notes that scientists at the conference in Durban were yesterday angry at South African President Thabo Mbeki's speech, in which he said poverty, not AIDS, was the most important cause of death in the developing world. Not everything could be "blamed on a single virus" whose prevalence, he implied, had been exaggerated. Nevertheless, notes the story, he pledged that South Africa would push forward with a mass prevention campaign.
South African Health Minister Manto Tsabalala-Msimang, however, defended her government's decision to concentrate on prevention rather than treatment. Attempts to supply cheap anti-retroviral drugs by overriding patents had been blocked by legal action from the global pharmaceutical industry, she said.
In other news, the FT (p.8) reports that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic agencies in the world, with assets of $22 billion, said it would donate $50 million towards treating HIV in Botswana. The donation is the latest contribution from the fund towards tackling the AIDS crisis, notes the story. It has already contributed $26 million for research into a vaccine.
Further, the Washington Post (p. A17) notes millions of cases of AIDS around the world might have been avoided if circumcision of men were more customary in sub-Saharan African countries where the disease is prevalent. On the other hand, it may be that circumcision is simply more common in populations at low risk for AIDS for different reasons. Those were the possibilities pondered today by AIDS researchers who heard provocative--although far from definitive--information about the links between male circumcision and infection with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
Papers presented at the 13th International AIDS Conference in Durban noted that while circumcision is common in broad swaths of Africa, it is uncommon in precisely those parts of the continent where HIV infection is most prevalent and the epidemic is spreading most rapidly.
Meanwhile, David Baltimore, California Institute of Technology president as well as chairman of the National Institutes of Health AIDS Vaccine Research Committee, writes in a Los Angeles Times op-ed (p. A15) that the best way to minimize the impact of the AIDS epidemic(given that a vaccine is a long way off) is education, education, education.
People need to know that every unprotected sexual encounter outside of a strictly monogamous relationship is a chance for transmission, as is every shared needle. Condoms, clean needles, abstinence, reduction of other infections, cleaning the blood supply, constant awareness of the danger--all are elements of protection. Africa now, and parts of Asia soon, are fighting for their very existence as civilized countries. They must mobilize as for war, and the international community must help, Baltimore writes.