Nearly half of South African adults risk HIV infection in next decade

CAPE TOWN, South Africa (Reuters) -- Nearly half of South African adults risk becoming infected with HIV within the next decade unless drastic steps are taken now, insurance actuary Rob Dorrington said on Thursday.

"About 45 percent of adults will become infected with HIV/AIDS unless there are significant changes in South Africa," Dorrington, professor of actuarial studies at the University of Cape Town, told a meeting of insurance assessors.

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"South Africa has all the ingredients to make sure the HIV/AIDS epidemic will be the most explosive of any country in the world," he added.

The South African government has stirred international outrage for casting doubt on whether HIV causes AIDS and refusing to give antimicrobial drugs to HIV-positive pregnant women and rape victims to prevent transmission or infection.

President Thabo Mbeki has said there is no proof that the drugs inhibit transmission of HIV and questions whether their side effects may make them too dangerous to use.

Instead, the main thrust of the government's anti-AIDS campaign is sexual abstinence and the use of condoms.

The Medical Research Council, which believes HIV does cause AIDS, said recently that it would start clinical trials of a vaccine against HIV next February with the aim of getting it to market within four years.

Dorrington said life expectancy in South Africa, at the heart of the global HIV/AIDS pandemic, would plummet to about 41 years by 2010 from the current 63 years.

"By then the chances of a 1ST-year-old dying before the age of 60 will have risen to 75 percent," he said.

He told the seventh annual meeting of the International Association of Insurance Supervisors that 13 percent of the country's 42 million people would be carrying the Human Immunologic Virus (HIV) by the end of this year.

The infection rate would be running at between 2,000 and 2,500 people a day, there would be 450,000 people sick from Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), which would have orphaned up to 150,000 children during the year alone.

Furthermore, up to 250,000 people will have died from AIDS this year.

Dorrington blamed the former apartheid government for hopelessly mismanaging the epidemic from the outset, noting that it did not even allow advertising for condoms until 1992 -- 10 years after the first AIDS case was identified in the country.

Andre Swamp, deputy chief executive of the national financial services industry watchdog the Financial Services Board, told the meeting he expected there would be 2 million AIDS orphans in South Africa by 2010.

He said 34 million people were infected with HIV worldwide, of whom 90 percent were in developing countries and 77 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.

The disease would kill 6 million people in South Africa over the next decade with major implications for crime and the economy, he added.

"We are really only at the beginning of the epidemic as far as actual AIDS deaths are concerned," Andre Ferriage, actuary at San lam Life, told the audience. "This is a train smash that is going to happen."

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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