South Africa's health minister predicts six million South Africans would be infected with HIV by 2005, and that AIDS would also leave his nation with one million orphans by the same time.
Manto Tshabalala-Msimang said Wednesday that the spread of HIV has been the fastest and the worst she has seen even though South Africa was one of the last countries in the world to be affected by the virus.
According to Reuters, Tshabalala said some 1,600 South Africans a day were infected with the HIV virus, with the latest surveys indicating six million of a total 40 million population would be infected within five years.
The United Nations reported last year that over 22 million of the approximately 33.4 million HIV-infected worldwide were occurring in sub-Saharan Africa.
And Tshabalala is concerned about the epidemic's economic impact, saying HIV affects the sector of South African society which drives the country's economy. "Failure to respond to this epidemic," she says, "will undermine the developmental gains made in the last five years."
She says a political commitment at the highest level, a unified approach to community organizations, and promoting sexual abstinence were critical to fighting the spread of HIV.
