Posted on 02/02/2005 2:37:38 AM PST by F15Eagle
BLANTYRE (Reuters) - AIDS (news - web sites) kills about 10 people every hour in Malawi and the government of the impoverished southern African nation is increasingly unable to cope with the crisis, Health Minister Heatherwick Ntaba said.
"This is a disaster because it means that the country is losing 240 people every day to HIV (news - web sites)/AIDS and at the end of 10 years an estimated 876,000 will die if the trend continues," Ntaba said in an interview late on Monday.
Malawi, with a population of about 11 million, is one of the countries at the center of the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to almost two-thirds of those infected with HIV/AIDS worldwide.
The government estimates that about 1 million Malawians are infected with the HIV virus (news - web sites) and about 640,000 have died from AIDS-related causes since 1985.
Ntaba said Malawi was increasingly finding itself outpaced by the disease, unable to spend the money necessary to develop proper strategies against it while simultaneously losing medical personnel to AIDS-related illness or better jobs overseas.
Malawi now spends about $12 per capita on health annually, far below the $36 per capita recommended by Health Ministry officials.
"Spending $12 per capita on health ... we are not going to make a dent in the fight against HIV/AIDS," Ntaba said.
Research by Malawi's Health Ministry shows that about 46 percent of all new adult infections occur in people younger than 24 with about 60 percent of them being girls.
Malawi last year launched a $196 million plan to distribute free anti-retroviral drugs under a five-year program paid for by the global fund set up to tackle AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.
Fifty sites across the landlocked country were identified to receive the drugs, but Health Ministry officials said only about 50,000 people were now getting them, well below target.
Ntaba said poverty, lack of recreational facilities and high unemployment were some of the factors driving particularly girls into early and unsafe sex or marriage.
Ntaba said Malawi's health sector was struggling because many medical professionals leave for better paying jobs overseas and others die from AIDS, leaving some 90 percent of physicians' posts and 35 percent of nurses' jobs in the country vacant.
"This is mainly due to HIV/AIDS and of course other factors like brain drain," he said.
ping
It is an STD at this point in time, there is a way to stop it
we know it's an STD, but many over there either do not know, do not wanna know or simply ignore that it is.
Why on Earth does it take these people billions of dollars to keep their zippers zipped?
We have spent billions, and the only strategy that works is morality. Something that money cannot buy. Let me guess, we are to send billions to Malawi and he will come up with an effective strategy, somehow.
How about he comes up with an effective strategy, and then we come up with money? As the freeper above said, how much does it cost to keep a zipper zipped? Aids has become a feeding trough for so many politicians it is as much of a scam as the oil for food debacle.
this is an odd conundrum.
Everyone....It's Bush's fault! BTW, no amount of money will stop the behavior.
So is the population declining? I looked up the world statistics for births and deaths after the tsunami disaster. Every day on average about 154,000 die around the world. Well over 300,000 are born.
Sometimes colonialism doesn't seem like such a bad idea.
.....lack of recreational facilities.....
He should institute immediately a program to establish pool halls all across the nation. It would be cheap and wholsome recreation that would eventually produce marching bands.
Dare I think that social darwinism might be the correct approach....when the worse of the bunch die off then the remaining ones might be worth saving.
I want to know what the AIDS-Minister is doing with those ten people he gets each hour? Is he winning them in a crad game or something?
But on a serious note. Uganda staretd a strict morality approach and their HIV rate is decreasing nicely.
Be moral and live or sleep around and die. It's a pretty easy decision
"this is an odd conundrum."
hmmm ... perhaps they need to hand out more conundrums in the schools...
or make conundrums free...
if they would only learn to use conundrums properly
even an odd one could work
The article is tosh.
African "Aids" death statistics are not based on counting bodies. Only ~1% of deaths (from ANY cause) are officially reported in most of Africa. These AIDs statistics are based on the WHO epimodels, which themselves are based on a ludicrous conflation of ELISA test results from ante-natal clinics.
As the ELISA test has never been tested against the HIV virus (and there is a reason for that) no-one knows what the specificity (false-positive) rate for the test is. But being black and being pregnant are known to give high false-positive rates on serological tests, especially ELISA.
Being black and being pregnant are the norm if you are at an African ante-natal clinic. So the junk ELISA test is fuelling hysterical predictions from the WHO, which morph into yet more damn-fool scare stories in the media (no disrespect meant to the poster).
This stuff is OLD. We have been getting these African scare stories for over a decade and the media keeps reporting them uncritically.
Plus they like to print prurient stories of subsaharan promisicuity which are highly at variance with reality. Africa is not awash with bathhouse-style sexual activity, nor is everyone having sex with green monkeys. African sexual activity and partner-numbers are just like ours.
Huh?
I guess that is to mean they are "bored" and hence, you know.
yet, has there really been a large decline in their population?....the way the "experts" talk there should be no Africans left by now....
we do know thought, that TB and even gastroenteritis and malaria are big problems.....but I guess nobody ever dies of those boring diseases....
I suppose it would be mean spirited to tell them to go do something productive in their spare time, huh?
hehe
You are so right! When will people wake up to the cause of these savage lust perverts. They aren't capable to learn anything. Billions for what? Do you think a condom and abstinince will change? Education for what? Don't screw babies? I am so sick of the total lack of reality from everyone everywhere including USA
I once had a conundrum on the beach. Water views and everything. I miss that place. Common fees were high though.
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