AIDS IN SOUTH AFRICA
And out of the darkness came forth light
New AIDS Foundation bears Nkosi Johnson's name
 
Country Analysis
The AIDS pandemic is well and truly established in South Africa. The South African Department of Health puts the estimated AIDS deaths at 700 per day. The following estimated statistics illustrates the seriousness of the pandemic:
  • Approximately 4,8 million South Africans are HIV+
  • An estimated 250 000 people died of AIDS in 1999 in South Africa
  • By 2010the HIV-infection rate among adults could reach 25% as opposed to 11% in 1999
  • In 1998 South Africa had 100 000 AIDS orphans and is presently estimated at 420 000.
  • By 2015 AIDS will have decimated 4,4 million South Africans
  • A pproximately 1700 -1900 South Africans become HIV+ everyday with two-thirds of them falling into the 15-20 age category
    ( December 2000 figures from World Heath Organisation and Centres for Disease Control )
In January 2000, The United Nations' Security Council debated on the impact of AIDS on peace and security in Africa. The debate was the first in the Council's history that discussed a health issue as a threat to peace and security. UN secretary-general Kofi Annan told the council: 'The impact of AIDS in Africa was no less destructive than war itself. By overwhelming the continent's health workers and teachers, AIDS is causing social and economic crises which in turn threaten political stability.
In already unstable societies, this cocktail of disasters is a sure recipe for more conflict. And conflict, in turn, provides fertile ground for further infections' (UN press release, 2000).
President of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, said at the same meeting that Africa's development gains were threatened by the AIDS epidemic and life expectancy gains were being wiped out. 'In AIDS, the world faced a war more debilitating than war itself…Without economic and social hope, there could not be peace, and AIDS undermined both' (UN press release 2000).
HIV/AIDS is now the killer disease in sub-Saharan Africa; its mortality rates surpassing people killed in warfare - in 1998 alone, for example, 200 000 people died from armed conflicts in Africa, compared with 2,2 million from AIDS (from The Star 12 January 2000).
According to UNAIDS (SAIRR, 2001:226) at the end of 1999 the HIV-infection rate in South Africa for people between the ages of 15 and 49 years stood at 19,94%. The same report illustrated the following differences in life expectancy and population growth:
Life Expectancy Population Growth
Without AIDS With AIDS Years Lost Without Aids Without Aids
  68.2 48.0 20.2 1,4% 0,4%
The South African Paediatrics Association claims that 7 000 babies were dying each month from AIDS. This figure does not include those orphaned by the disease.
An estimated 22 million orphans in sub-Saharan Africa by 2010 are expected to comprise a 'lost orphaned generation' with little hope of educational or employment opportunities. Such societies will be at risk of increased crime and political instability as these young people become radicalized or are exploited by various political groups for their own ends - the child soldier phenomenon. (Pieter Fourie: RAU political lecturer)
What drives this disease to such a horrific pace in Africa? Are Africans particularly vulnerable to HIV? The answer to the last question is 'yes' - given the socio-economic factors experienced in sub-Saharan Africa. Africans are not more sexually active than people in the West or in the global North, but the poverty, geographical displacement and regional conflicts have become the societal determinants that are fanning the HIV infection on the continent.
Women are physiologically at greater risk than men are of contracting HIV through heterosexual modes of transmission. In Africa, the number of women infected with HIV outnumbers infected men. Young African women between the ages of 15 and 19 are four to six times more likely to be infected than men of the same ages. Women are more easily infected with HIV when they have sex with a positive man than when a man has sex with a positive woman. Women's economic, social, sexual and cultural subordination and equality make frighteningly material impacts on each positive women's life.
Historically, large-scale orphaning has been a sporadic, short-term problem caused by war, famine or disease. However, the HIV/AIDS pandemic has transformed orphaning into a long-term chronic problem that will extend at least through the first third of the twenty-first century. This is because the increase in orphan rates lags behind HIV-infection levels by about ten years (the time it takes the average person who contracts the virus to die from full-blown AIDS).
As the AIDS epidemic progresses, there will be fewer adults of normal parenting age to care for the children they leave behind. The burden of care will increasingly fall on other children or upon the growing proportion of elderly people.
Moreover, for a child living with a parent who has AIDS, the disease is especially cruel as HIV is sexually transmitted. Consequently, once one parent is infected, he or she is likely to pass it onto the other parent. Children who lose a parent to AIDS are thus at considerable risk of losing their remaining parent. Consequently, these children have to take on the role of mother, father or both, do housework, support and care for their siblings plus their ill or dying parents.
They grow up impoverished, tend to be socially excluded, are not fully cared for because of the loss of their parent(s), are often discriminated against, and grow up in an environment where social bonds are falling apart because of the high AIDS-related mortality rates among all sectors of society.