AIDS

Author: Alejandro Grinspun
Thematic Area: Social Protection

Abstract:"Since the first case was diagnosed in 1981, HIV/AIDS has become the deadliest disease in history and a development crisis of unprecedented proportions. Only last year, over three million people died of AIDS and almost five million became newly infected with HIV, which now affects some 40 million people around the world. Nowhere have the impacts of AIDS been more severe than in Southern Africa, where adult HIV prevalence hovers around 20% — up to nearly 40% in Botswana and Swaziland. In the worst-affected countries, up to 60% of today’s 15-year-olds will not reach their sixtieth birthday if current infection rates continue. Already in Zimbabwe, life expectancy at birth dropped from 52 to 34 years in the last 15 years. Dramatic declines are also projected in the Caribbean, which has the world´s second highest HIV prevalence. Prevalence rates are lower in other regions but, in the absence of preventive measures, may rise steeply in the coming years. The epidemic is expanding rapidly in Asia, where India already has the largest number of HIV-positive people outside South Africa. Meanwhile, reported HIV cases have increased nine-fold in Eastern Europe in less than ten years, as the virus spreads from high-risk groups to the general population. Once this happens, it is society’s most vulnerable who become more exposed. In the US, the black minority now accounts for about half of all new infections, while in Russia, where the proportion of sexually-acquired HIV cases quadrupled in just two years, women represent 38% of newly reported infections, up from 24% in 2001. Elsewhere, too, women are increasingly at greater risk of contracting the virus. African women, for instance, are becoming infected at an earlier age and in greater numbers than men. The difference is most pronounced among young Africans, where females aged 15-24 are over three times more likely to acquire HIV than males of the same age group. In fact, AIDS is imposing a double burden on women. Apart from being increasingly affected by the disease, they provide the bulk of care for the sick, the dying and the orphaned. Women make up 75% of all caregivers for persons with HIV in Viet Nam and two-thirds in South Africa, a quarter of them over the age of 60. Yet in many countries, women are systematically denied the right to inherit and own land, which condemns them and their children to certain destitution after a partner’s death." (...)

Keywords:AIDS
Publication Date:
Type/Issue:Policy In Focus/5
ISSN:2318-8995