PRESS BRIEFING BY SPECIAL ENVOY FOR HIV/AIDS IN AFRICA

Following yesterday’s two gloomy reports on the HIV/AIDS pandemic worldwide, Stephen Lewis, the Special Envoy of the Secretary-General for HIV/AIDS in Africa, today told correspondents at a Headquarters briefing that the scourge in Africa was now “conclusively and irreversibly a ferocious assault on women and girls”.

Briefing correspondents on yesterday’s reports, released by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), Mr. Lewis drew attention to two particular aspects of the reports that related directly to Africa.  The first was that behind the prediction of a possible 68 million additional deaths by the year 2020, 55 million of them in Africa, was the finding that the pandemic had not yet begun to level off in Africa, even in the countries with the highest prevalence of HIV/AIDS.

“To this catalogue of horrors,” said Mr. Lewis, “must be added in the case of Africa that the pandemic is now conclusively and irreversibly a ferocious assault on women and girls.  We all understood that the percentages were rising; we all understood that women were particularly vulnerable; we all understood that the pandemic was feasting on gender inequality; I am not sure, however, that any of us understood until now the full magnitude of the accelerating catastrophe for women . . . .  The figures tell the story, and I make no apology for using the figures.  Somehow the world has to be made to understand what’s happening.”

According to the UNAIDS report, of the 26 million infected adults between the ages of 15 and 49 in sub-Saharan Africa, women now constituted 15 million, or 58 per cent.  That figure was distressing enough, he said, but became even more ominous when linked to the data from the UNICEF report.  At the very outset of that document was a breakdown of the numbers of young people between 15 and 24 years of age living with AIDS in various regions of the world.  For sub-Saharan Africa the total was 8.6 million, 67 per cent of whom were young women.  The ratio of young women to young men was an explicit two to one. 

“Put that in the context that more than half the new infections now occur among young people -- some 6,000 new infections a day -- and you can see what is in prospect for Africa,” he said.  “I am not a statistician, but if the present reality is 58 per cent and the future reality is 67 per cent, we’re talking about the unthinkable -- a looming cataclysm for the women of Africa.”

In Botswana, the percentage of young women living with AIDS was 45 per cent.  The comparable figure for young men was 19 per cent.  In Lesotho, young women accounted for 51 per cent of the infected, young men for 23 per cent.  In South Africa, the numbers were 31 per cent for women as compared to 13 per cent for men.  In Swaziland it was 47 per cent to 18.  In Zambia, 25 to 10.  In Zimbabwe, 40 per cent to 15.  In Namibia, 29 to 8.  In Malawi, 18 to 8.  In Cameroon, 15 to 6.  In the Central African Republic, 16 per cent to 7 per cent.  In Rwanda, 13 to 6.  The pattern was comparable for all African countries, he said.

In every single country, young HIV-positive women represented two to three times more than the number of HIV-positive young men.  “I despair of the numbing recitation of statistics you’re going to have to read.  Forgive me, but they reveal a relentlessly grim picture,” said Mr. Lewis.  The percentage of HIV prevalence for women attending ante-natal care clinics in urban settings -- again using the high range quoted from the tables -- was 56 per cent for Botswana, 42 per cent for Lesotho, 28 for Malawi, 31 for Namibia, 30 for South Africa, 32 for Swaziland, 23 for Tanzania, 31 for Zambia and 33 per cent for Zimbabwe.  And the phenomenon was not solely an urban one, he added.

He emphasized that the median figures were lower, sometimes significantly lower.  But regardless of the percentages used, every one of them constituted a nightmare for women.  The background papers prepared by UNAIDS stated that one third to almost one half of new mothers in the worst-affected countries could die of AIDS.

The Special Envoy then turned to what he called “the astonishing lack of knowledge about AIDS, transmission, prevention, and sexuality among the young people surveyed” in more than 60 national surveys and reports.  He offered the following as representative glimpses of reality:  in Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea, Lesotho and Sierra Leone, more than 80 per cent of young women between the ages of 15 and 24 did not have adequate knowledge about sex.  In Nigeria, 95 per cent of girls aged 15 to 19 perceived their risk of contracting AIDS to be minimal or non-existent.  In Nigeria again, 61 per cent of unmarried sexually active young men between 15 and 24 did not use a condom during sexual intercourse, and “incredibly enough”, 93 per cent of those young men felt no risk or a small risk of contracting HIV.

In a large number of African countries, he said, but specifically in Somalia, Burundi Comoros, Uganda, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Tanzania, Sierra Leone, Chad, Niger, Mauritania, Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea Bissau, Senegal, Central African Republic, Sao Tome and Principe, Gambia and Togo, a majority of the girls surveyed did not know where to seek a test for HIV.  And, as if in corroboration of those figures and studies, he said that 17 to 22 per cent of girls aged

15–19 in the major urban areas of East and Southern Africa were already infected.  In Ethiopia, 14 per cent of young women surveyed said they had had sex before the age of 15.  In Nigeria the figure was 17 per cent.  “These two countries, with a combined population of nearly 200 million, stand at the very precipice of an explosion in the pandemic,” Mr. Lewis said.

He added that the report also chronicled the sexual violence and predatory sexual behaviour of older men, the girls pulled out of school to care for sick and dying parents, the complicating malevolence of the sex trade, the growth of the orphan population and much more. 

Describing the report as a “true and full compendium”, he said that “if it can be said that by the year 2020, the number of deaths from AIDS in Africa will approximate the number of deaths, military and civilian combined, in both world wars of the twentieth century, then it should also be said that a pronounced majority of those deaths will be women and girls.  The toll on women and girls is beyond human imagining.  It presents Africa and the world with a practical and a moral challenge which places gender at the centre of the human condition.” 

Mr. Lewis recalled that the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD), presented at the recent G-8 Summit, had included a strong paragraph which said unequivocally that unless communicable diseases such as HIV/AIDS were defeated, economic and social development in Africa would be “an impossible hope”.  He went on to say:  “We have all the knowledge we need to turn the pandemic around.  But to do it, there must be a huge quantum leap in financial resources.  On those truths, there seems to be an international consensus.”

He noted that the formal G-8 response to NEPAD acknowledged that HIV/AIDS affected all aspects of Africa’s future development and should therefore be factored into all aspects of support for Africa.  The G-8 response further included what he called “a series of predictable commitments” which resonated with good will and purpose.  “What has not yet resonated are the dollars to meet the commitment.  The shortfall is staggering.  Billions and billions of dollars meant to prolong and save human life in Africa over the next generation -– yet the Global Fund is desperately underfunded.  The Secretary-General has asked for seven to $10 billion a year to fight the pandemic.  This year the fund has roughly $800 million.”

To a correspondent who asked who was going to put up the necessary funding, since in his view “the G-8 doesn’t care too much, really,” Mr. Lewis said that whether or not that was the case, the G-8 had to be pressed more to provide the funds they had indeed undertaken to provide.

To another question, he said that many African Governments spent a significant percentage of their budgets on health and AIDS, and although the figures varied from country to country, they had all agreed at the Abuja Summit that they would aim to spend 15 per cent of their total budgets on health-related matters.

“But no government in Africa, where you have a per capita income of less than a dollar a day -- and in many cases, barely two dollars a day -- no government in Africa can afford the cost of anti-retroviral treatment.  They just can’t.”

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