The countries most hit by Aids

INDIA, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa each have at least 2 million adults suffering from AIDS or infected with the HIV virus, according to a new U.N. statistical analysis released on Thursday. And in five African countries — Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe — at least 20 percent of the population or one out of every five adults is infected with the killer disease, “We’ve gone from a bad to a worse situation and we haven’t reached the peak yet in terms of illness, death, population loss and human suffering,” said Joseph Chamie, director of the United Nations Population Division, which prepared the charts. The statistics were released ahead of a special U.N. General Assembly AIDS summit from June 25 to 27, which is expected to set goals for a world action program to fight the disease. They analyse population, fertility, mortality and health spending and examine the impact of AIDS in the 45 most-affected countries. More than 36 million people around the world are living with HIV or AIDS, some 25 million of them in Africa alone. India, with a population of more than 1 billion people, lost 310,000 people to the disease in 1999. The figures for Ethiopia, with a population of only 63 million people, showed 280,000 AIDS deaths, 30,000 more than Nigeria, which has 114 million people, according to the survey. People in eight African countries will have lost at least 17 years of life expectancy by the year 2005: Botswana, Kenya, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Hardest-hit in this group is Botswana where people are dying at an average of 23 years earlier — at 44 years of age rather than 68 — than they would have without AIDS, the study said. The disease hits all economic strata, especially young adults in their most productive years, leaving children without parents. Ethiopia, Nigeria and Uganda each have more than 900,000 “AIDS orphans” as a result of the disease. But even with whole generations being decimated in some nations, Africa’s population is projected to grow from 800 million to 2 billion by mid-century, Chamie told Reuter. However, he said, “The deaths are occurring in all socio-economic groups, hitting not only the poor but the middle class and the well-to-do and affecting the entire demographic structure.” “We haven’t seen any parallels to this in recent modern history,” Chamie said. Prevention, despite numerous programs around the world, is also in its infancy stages. The use of condoms, the cheapest and most effective form of protection against AIDS during sexual contact, is rare in most regions of the world. In nearly all African countries the use rate is less than 5 percent, the study said. Only four countries in Asia and four in Latin America and the Caribbean have condom use rates of 10 percent or more. The highest rate of condom use is in Japan with 46 percent and in Europe where Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Spain and Slovakia all show a rate over 20 percent. The U.S. condom usage rate is 13 percent and Britain’s is 18 percent, behind Singapore at 24 percent. Treatment is nearly non-existent in developing nations with the highest infection rates, apart from Brazil, which has a comprehensive health program and has cut its death rate in half during the last decade. In Africa, no more than 10,000 people in advanced stages of the disease are being treated with expensive antiretroviral drugs, AIDS experts say. Impoverished nations have few basic health services. In the 10 countries most severely affected by the disease, health expenditures range from $3 to $246 per person. Most African countries spend less than $100 per capita annually compared to $2116 in Norway, the charts show. Reuter