Africa remains rife with disasters

The old adage that no news is good news, alas, does not apply to Africa.

Africa this past year has suffered fratricidal wars and devastating epidemics that continue to claim lives by the tens of thousands. Yet little news from Africa, if any, gets reported in the international media, and even less in the United States.

The continent remains rife with disasters — both created by man and as a result of poor or nonexisting health care, illiteracy, poverty, malnutrition and substandard norms of living.

Civil wars have been raging in the Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sudan, Sierra Leone, Somalia and Zimbabwe, and refugee crises abound in Angola, the Congo, Rwanda and Burundi. Tens of millions of people remain displaced as a result of decades of continued warfare, with numbers mounting daily.

In some countries such as Sudan and Niger, slavery continues to be practiced. In other parts of the continent, famine is always around the corner and life expectancy is the lowest in the world.

A report released Dec. 18 by the World Health Organization estimated life expectancy in Sierra Leone at 34 years — the lowest in the world. Japan has the highest life expectancy in the world at 81.9 years.

In the world today, of the 43 million people living with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, more than half, or 29.4 million, live in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 5 million people worldwide who will be infected with HIV this year, 3.5 million will be in Africa, where 58 percent of those who are HIV-positive are women.

In sub-Saharan Africa 17 million people have died of AIDS since the 1980s, and the disease continues to kill 5,000 adults and 1,000 children every day across the continent.

The horror and extent of the disease has brought promises of assistance from world leaders such as President Bush. But a combination of poverty, government inaction and corruption, myth and stigma continues to drive the epidemic to historic levels.

In Africa, 16 nations have disease-prevalence rates exceeding 10 percent — 20 times that of Western nations — but many governments continue to ignore the epidemic that fills hospital wards and results in millions of homeless orphans.

In South Africa, nearly 5 million people, or 15 percent of the population, are infected with HIV. Some 8,000 babies are born to HIV-infected mothers each month. Of those born with the infection, few live beyond age 4.

AIDS has claimed so many lives in South Africa that often people are buried vertically for lack of space in cemeteries.

“One has to consider Africa is mainly an agricultural society,” Dr. Thomas Quinn, professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, said at a meeting of the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene. “Seven million farmers have died due to AIDS. One has to ask: Who is farming the land?”

Farming is not the only area affected. “One also has to look at the educational process as well as the working process,” added Dr. Quinn, explaining that 85 percent of teacher deaths in South Africa over the past 20 years have been from AIDS.

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