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From Africa Recovery, Special compilation of AIDS articles (June 2004), page 3 Tragedy and hope: Africa's struggle against HIV/AIDS Some twenty years ago, the first cases of a mysterious illness that destroyed the body's natural defences against infection were reported in the United States. Since then, the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that leaves victims exposed to an array of diseases known collectively as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS), has become a global health emergency. But it is in sub-Saharan Africa, the world's poorest and least developed region, where HIV/AIDS has gone from emergency to tragedy -- endangering not just the lives of its victims but the social, economic and political fabric of society. The numbers alone are crushing. At the end of 2003 the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) estimated that two-thirds of the 40 million people living with the virus were African. Some 3 million of the 5 million new infections in 2003 also occurred in Africa, where infection rates are seven times the world's average. In some countries, as much as 40 per cent of the total population carries HIV. In a region where nearly half of the population lives on less than $1 per day, barely 1 in 100 people in need of lifesaving anti-retroviral drugs can afford them. For the rest there is only the certainty of slow death -- 2.3 million of them in 2003 alone -- and a grimly uncertain future for the millions of orphans they leave behind. This special reprint edition of Africa Recovery documents some of the key developments in Africa's struggle against the disease, and highlights the efforts of Africans and their international partners to turn back the tide. The articles include an analysis of the role of men in prevention, a look at efforts to reduce HIV transmission in the military, and the terrible combination of famine and HIV/AIDS in Southern Africa. Other articles examine the development impact of the pandemic, the plight of AIDS orphans and the battle to break through the price barrier to care and treatment for the poor. Africa's own efforts are detailed in articles on successful prevention campaigns in Senegal and Uganda, and on Botswana's pioneering commitment to provide care and treatment to all of its citizens with HIV. An article on two unprecedented drug treatment initiatives, one by the World Health Organization and another by the US government, bring the issue to the present, and to what many observers say is an historic moment of opportunity. Resources for HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment programmes, though still woefully inadequate, are increasing. Many more African political leaders have taken personal leadership of anti-AIDS efforts. A vibrant, engaged and independent African civil society, increasingly led by people living with HIV/AIDS, has emerged to energize the struggle, confront stigma and discrimination and give the disease a human face. The long, damaging argument over whether to fund treatment or prevention programmes appears to have been settled in favour of a comprehensive response combining education, prevention, and care and treatment. All of these developments are reasons for hope, even if, for too many, they come too late. As the enormity of the HIV/AIDS crisis engulfing Africa has slowly emerged from the fog of silence and denial that surrounds it, observers have struggled for words that convey its magnitude. Some draw parallels with modern political horrors, likening the pandemic to a "weapon of mass destruction" or an African "Holocaust." Others look to history for a sense of scale, comparing AIDS to the plague that decimated medieval Europe or the scourges of ancient times. Sometimes the words are heartbreakingly personal, as when UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan speaks of his experience at the bedside of a dying mother. At other times the words are angry -- denouncing a world that has spent a decade bickering over trade rules and medicine patents while the death toll climbed into the tens of millions. The words in this HIV/AIDS special issue have a more modest goal: to chronicle the path that has taken Africa to this time of opportunity. The continent's future may well depend on where we all go from here. [ Table of Contents / Silent no more, Africa fights HIV/AIDS ]
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