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AIDS Devastates Africa, Destroys Human Dignity



Every family in the southern African state of Malawi has lost a loved one to AIDS.

The hundreds lying listlessly in Malawi's rotting and over-stretched central hospital will be the next to die from the disease, receiving little more than paracetamol and saline drips to ease their final painful and tormented moments.

Family members, still scared by the stigma attached to AIDS in Africa, insist doctors write on the death certificate tuberculosis or other diseases as the cause of death.

The tragedy of Lilongwe's miserable hospital, where 10 patients are crammed into the dark and stench-filled rooms designed for three, is repeated across the continent from Cape Town to Cairo.

AIDS has brought untold human misery to Africa, destroyed nearly 50 years of development and raised fears that peace and security could be threatened by unprecedented population losses and economic upheaval.

Few in Africa have been unscathed by the worst epidemic to hit a continent since the bubonic plague halved Europe's population more than 600 years ago.

AIDS KILLS 12 MILLION AFRICANS

Since the disease took a grip on the poverty-stricken continent, 12 million Africans have died of AIDS.

More than 23 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to be living with HIV, the virus which leads to AIDS, some two-thirds of the world's HIV-positive population.

By 2005 more people in sub-Saharan Africa will have died than in both World Wars combined, according to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights.

Equally alarming is the prospect that in the three most badly hit countries of Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe populations will for the first time actually shrink by the end of this decade.

One in five people in seven regional states -- including economic powerhouse South Africa and neighbouring Zimbabwe -- are already HIV-positive and there are few signs of optimism.

Health systems are on the verge of breakdown, precious skilled labour forces are being decimated and a new generation of orphans numbering millions will be the lasting legacy of the AIDS disaster.

Life expectancy is dropping by 10 to 20 years, reaching as low as 30 years old, which are levels not seen since the start of the 20th century.

So alarmed are United Nations officials and health workers that the call has gone out for a Marshall Plan, similar to that to resurrect post-war Europe, to rescue Africa from the abyss.

Without a change in sexual behaviour, backed by a vigorous programme to educate the young and increase drastically the availability of anti-AIDS drugs, Africa faces a cataclysm unmatched in modern history, experts say.

"We don't have a handle on the epidemic...We may be losing the fight unless our efforts are redoubled," said UNAIDS Zambia head Kenneth Ofosu-Barko.

HUMAN DIGNITY LOST IN AIDS FIGHT

AIDS has reached crisis proportions through huge swathes of Africa.

Malawi's predominantly rural social fabric is being destroyed by the disease while neighbouring Zambia, one of the world's poorest countries, faces losing one in five of its economically active adult population.

Anti-AIDS drugs are beyond the reach of all but a rich elite, many involved in corruption. Basic health care provision is virtually non-existent or collapsing under the weight of ever increasing patients.

A USAID review of home-based care in Malawi found patients and their children severely malnourished, bed-ridden patients with bed sores without even a thin mattress and no painkillers.

Up to 80 percent of hospital beds in Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya and Cote D'Ivoire hold HIV patients, according to the World Bank.

"We're seeing more deaths than ever before...There are orphans just a few months old with HIV," said Ben Njobvu, research coordinator at the Chikankata hospital, 125 km (78 miles) south of the Zambian capital Lusaka.

LACK OF POLITICAL WILL TO FIGHT DISEASE

African political leadership, swayed by the cultural taboos that still surround AIDS, is lacking despite a calamity that is killing 10 times more people than the continent's many wars.

AIDS experts working in the region say that too often, well-intentioned small-scale efforts by NGOs are uncoordinated and by their very size unequal to the task facing them.

"Political leaders have their heads in the sand. There is no hope, it's a crime against humanity that so many have been allowed to die," said a senior United Nations official in southern Africa.

Funding to give relief to AIDS suffers was also too often frittered away on seminars and allowances while the reluctance of churches to condone condom use had also made the fight in Africa more difficult, AIDS workers said.

Health workers and NGOs say that private care is on the brink of breaking down under the strain of growing numbers.

"It's getting worse...We can't help everybody and we are now at our limit," said Sister Leonia who has run the Mother of Mercy Hospice outside Lusaka for the last eight years.

The hospice offers rare comfort and dignity to its patients who spend their final months in relative comfort with access to food, palliative care and spiritual assistance.

Andrew Mwale, 38, and his wife have been HIV-positive for four years and come to the hospice for basic medicine. They are among the few brave enough to openly talk about their disease.

"AIDS still remains very stigmatised in Zambia. People are still uncomfortable...People can't test (for HIV) in this environment and they are willing to stay in a dream and be ignorant," said Mwale, who will become one of the 1.6 million Zambians to die of AIDS over the next 15 years.
  
  (From China Daily)

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