Aids, Poverty and Ignorance in South Africa :: South Africa AIDS Disease Health Essays

Aids, Poverty and Ignorance in southeastward Africa Twenty years after the first clinical record of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) was reported, it has become the approximately devastating disease humankind has ever faced. Since the epiphytotic began, more than 60 million people have been infected with the computer virus worldwide. Data shows an estimated 57,520,805 infected people around the world with that number increase by approximately 1,400 people per day (redribbon.co.za). AIDS is now the leaders cause of death in sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide, it is the fourth-biggest killer. At the end of 2003, an estimated 46 million people globally were living with AIDS. In many separate of the developing world, the majority of new infections occur in adolescent adults, with young women especially vulnerable. About one-third of those currently living with AIDS atomic number 18 aged 1524. Most of them do not know they die hard the virus. Millions more know nothin g or too little some AIDS to protect themselves against it. Dr. Malegaparu Makgoba, President of the Medical interrogation Council of South Africa, warns that as Africa faces the challenges of its renewal or renaissance, there is no greater potential obstruction to the attainment of this vision than the specter of the HIV/AIDS epidemic (mrc.ac.za). The most affected part of the world has been Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular South Africa. The groundbreaking article released at the end of 2002 by the Medical Research Council of South Africa, the Impact of HIV/Aids on adult fatality rate in South Africa report is the first comprehensive examination of death rate statistics from the AIDS era. In a strongly worded introduction to the report, Dr. Makgoba states that as a consequence of early beliefs that AIDS was a disease exclusively imputable to homosexuality and that many Africans promoted the notion that homosexual practices were unAfrican, thus sowing the seeds for denial to excuse why AIDS would not be prevalent in their communities (mrc.ac.za). He believes that this denial was compounded by stigmatization, chauvinism, the distortion of scientific evidence, and ignorance (mrc.ac.za). The report shows data proving that AIDS is the biggest killer in South Africawith an estimated 40% of adult deaths during 2003 were caused by AIDS. According to the researchers of the Impact of HIV/AIDS on Adult mortality in South Africa, AIDS will continue to be a growing problem in South Africa.