[If some of you will recall, I have put out estimates, quite a long time back, possibly years ago, which said that by 2005 or thereabouts over 350,000 people would die in S.Africa annually from AIDS. As you can see from the news report below this scientific prediction has come true.

I noted dear, idiotic Bishop Tutu one day gushing: “We defeated Apartheid, we’ll defeat AIDS”. I just smiled. When you fought Apartheid, you were fighting humans, but when you fight AIDS you’re fighting God/Nature… Guess where I’m placing my bets!!! Jan]

From Karen:-
If they don’t put the real cause on the death sertificates this is still incorrect.

Over a third of a million South Africans have died of Aids over the past year, the Medical Research Council (MRC) told members of Parliament’s science and technology portfolio committee on Tuesday.

“Current data… estimates that round about the mid-point of 2006, something like 336 000 deaths in the preceding 12 months were Aids related,” MRC president Tony Mbewu said.

Briefing MPs on his organisation’s research, he warned the deadly disease had a different profile in South Africa compared to the rest of the world.

“The (Aids) epidemic in South Africa, is… (one) that first takes root in late teenage and early adulthood among women. This is rather different from the epidemic worldwide.”

According to figures presented by Mbewu to the committee, HIV prevalence levels in the age group 20-to-24, are about 25 percent among women, compared to about 10 percent among men.

The figures for the 15-to-19 age group reveal an even more startling discrepancy ” less than one percent prevalence among males, compared to about eight percent among females.

Mbewu said the Aids epidemic in South Africa was a generalised and a “feminised” epidemic, that had really “taken off” after 1990.

“For some reason, women in South Africa tend to get infected earlier, and there are various theories and hypotheses as to why might.

“But it is germane to the sort of interventions we at the MRC, and scientists generally in South Africa, are developing to meet the challenge of this epidemic. Trying to meet the fact that it is women who are disproportionately affected, certainly early on in life.”

Mbewu said half of the MRC’s R320-million budget from government was devoted to HIV and Aids research. A third of the organisation’s scientists were engaged in this research.

“The MRC takes this deadly epidemic very seriously. Not only is it causing untold death and suffering to South Africans, it also threatens to reverse many of the developmental gains we have made, particularly since 1994.

He said there was a reluctance among South African doctors ” who certified about 80 percent of deaths in the country ” to write HIV or Aids on a death certificate.

“This is because of the very powerful stigma associated with HIV in this country.”

Because of this, it was “difficult to get a true idea of the burden of Aids in this country… from the death certificates that are collected by Home Affairs, and that Statistics South Africa process”.

There were currently an estimated 5.54 million HIV-positive South Africans, about 11.6 percent of the population.

On the impact of Aids on South Africa’s economy, he said recent data from the University of Stellenbosch suggested that by 2010, the reduction in GDP growth might be 0.4 percent as a result of the epidemic.

“Now this is much less than we had thought even a year ago… it may well be that the doomsday scenario the World Bank was portraying about economic collapse in South Africa by 2020 due to HIV/Aids may well be incorrect.”

Mbewu stressed prevention was the key to successfully tackling the epidemic.

Source: IAFRICA
URL: http://iafrica.com/news/sa/974579.htm/p>