Five million South Africans will have died because of HIV by 2010, according to projections presented to a committee of the South African parliament by the South African Medical Research Council (MRC).
The prediction, based on figures from the Actuarial Society of South Africa, would see the number of AIDS orphans in the country increase ten-fold from 200,000 today to over 2 million by 2010 -2014.
Debbie Bradshaw of the MRC told South African MPs on the arts, culture and science committee that HIV prevalence in pregnant women had increased from less than 1% in 1990 to 25% today and that the huge mortality related to HIV would impact on business, government and economy in South Africa. “There will be a very direct cost to companies in terms of absenteeism, the loss of skills, lower productivity and overtime costs – where healthy staff have to work extra to make up for sick co-workers” said Bradshaw.
The South African health sector would, Bradshaw predicted, be particularly hard it, with disproportionate numbers of skilled staff ill or dying because of HIV and HIV-positive patients taking up hospital beds, particularly as there could be an “explosive” increase in the number of TB cases with 40% of people with HIV developing the AIDS defining condition.
Bradshaw also predicted that the educational sector would be hard-hit, with more teachers dying than there were trained replacements and children forced to drop-out of education to work in place of or care for ill HIV-positive family members.
South Africa’s population growth, which had run at around 3% in the mid-1980s would flatten out, said Bradshaw, with only migration from other countries preventing a drop in population.