Question

Why has HIV/AIDS spread so quickly in South Africa and What has been the economic impact of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa??

Answer 1

For an AIDS epidemic Botswana seems to be an unlikely location. Vast and underpopulated, the epidemiologists say to be traditional niches for the human immunodeficiency virus is mostly free of the teeming slums, war zones and drug cultures in the inner-city. Botswana is a Paradise in Africa. Large diamond reserves were discovered shortly after gaining independence from Britain in 1966, and the economy has since grown faster and longer than that of virtually any other nation in the world. Education is free, corruption is scarce, crime rates are small, and the country never went to war.

In Botswana the virus spread extremely rapidly. Two decades ago there was practically no HIV-positive person here. An estimated 20 per cent of sexually active adults had been infected by 1992. The proportion had hit one-third by 1995, and it is around 40 per cent today. In Francistown, the second-largest city in Botswana, almost half of all pregnant women are positive for HIV in the main hospital study. In the rest of sub-Saharan Africa the situation is almost as grim. In South Africa, AIDS has murdered Zulu nurses, Masai teachers in Tanzania, Kikuyu housewives in Kenya, Pygmy elders in Uganda. HIV infection rates in Swaziland range from about 6 percent in Uganda to 39 percent.

The problem often impacts elderly people heavily; many struggle to take care of their ill children and are also left to care for orphaned grandchildren. The pain and suffering which children are forced to endure is hard to overemphasise. When parents and family members get sick, children assume more responsibility for raising money, generating food and caring for family members. In Africa more children were orphaned by AIDS than anywhere else. Most children are now raised by extended families and some are still left alone in children's homes

AIDS harms companies by squeezing productivity, adding costs, diverting productive resources and depleting skills. Also, with the epidemic's impact on households growing more severe, market demand for products and services may fall. AIDS is erasing decades of success in increasing life expectancy in many sub-Saharan African countries. The largest rise in deaths was among adults aged between 20 and 49. This group now accounts for 60% of all deaths in sub-Saharan Africa AIDS affects adults in their most successful years and excludes the very people who should respond to the crisis