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50% pregnant women HIV+
04/08/2003 18:24 - (SA)
Durban - In some parts of South Africa half of all pregnant women are infected with HIV, the first South African Aids conference heard in Durban on Monday.
These statistics come at a time when the Ministry of Health has delayed issuing the 2002 antenatal HIV Prevalence study and has ignored a Democratic Alliance attempt to secure the statistics in terms of the Promotion of Access to Information Act.
The Treatment Action Campaign has also announced that it will intensify civil disobedience campaigns around the country until government agrees to an Aids treatment plan.
Professor Quarraisha Abdool Karim of the Centre for the Aids Programme of Research in South Africa (Caprisa) said that 10% of the global burden of HIV infection resided in South Africa.
She delivered statistics that showed figures for HIV infection in pregnant women were higher in some areas than in sex workers.
A study of sex workers from 1996 to 1999 in Kwazulu-Natal showed infection rates averaging 18.2% (in a range of 13% to 23%).
Although the province-wide statistics for HIV prevalence among pregnant women was 33.5% in 2001 in Kwazulu-Natal, it was as high as 50.8% in young pregnant women at Hlabisa clinic in northern Kwazulu-Natal in the same year.
The DA has accused government of a "cover-up" in not releasing the antenatal HIV prevalence figures which are "the only measurement compiled by government tracing the progression of HIV infections in South Africa".
Karim noted that from 1982 to 1987 when HIV was first detected in South Africa, it was a clade B subtype, "largely limited to men who have sex with men and transfusion recipients".
Between 1987 to 1993, the epidemic had moved to the heterosexual population and was mostly clade C, doubling the infection rate every 15 months.
Explosive spread
From 1994 to 1998 HIV saw an "explosive spread" in South Africa. Department of Health figures show that in 1990 less than three percent of antenatal clinic attendees had HIV, while statistics in 2001 were resting at 30% of pregnant women.
Provincially in 2001, an average of 33.5% of pregnant women attending antenatal clinics in Kwazulu-Natal were infected with HIV, compared to 29.8% in Gauteng, 25.2% in North West, 14.5% in Limpopo and 8.6% in the Western Cape.
After 1998, Karim said, Aids mortality began rising rapidly while high HIV incidence figures remained but HIV prevalence was almost static. In that year, as an example, at King Edward Hospital, 54% of medical in-patients were HIV positive and 56% of HIV-positive patients also had tuberculosis.
An HIV-positive person admitted to that hospital was 22% more likely to die than someone not infected with HIV (only nine percent of whom were likely to die).
Karim said that the death rate would continue to rapidly rise, as would an increase in the number of orphans and a continuing large number of new HIV infections.
To stop this, she said it was critical that interventions now target youth, address gender inequity and ensure the greater involvement of men in prevention programmes.
- SAPA
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