AIDS and private sector in SA

From the HIV AIDS News newsletter (South Africa) :

Aids wrecking SA's skills base, say analysts

Jillian Green
April 07 2006 at 09:17AM

HIV and Aids is having a devastating effect on the economy.

"We are losing people who are in the prime of their lives and who should be productive members of the economy," says Russell Lamberti of researchers Econometrix.

Lamberti was among a group of analysts taking part in a debate concerning the impact of HIV and Aids on the economy at the inaugural Private Sector Conference on HIV and Aids in Midrand on Thursday.

"HIV is concentrating on those who should be growing the economy, and we need to look at what skills we are losing," Lamberti said.

He said some studies indicated that the effects of HIV on the economy were between 2,5 and 3 percent, which was huge in terms of the impact on the gross domestic product.

Most of the analysts agreed that current responses were not enough to turn the tide.

Alan Whiteside, the executive director of the HIV and Aids Research Division (Heard) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, said the country's responses were "looking at the wrong things".

"We are not looking to the future. While big private companies are doing something about HIV in the workplace, on the micro business level, a lot more needs to be done."

He added there was much that small businesses could do to fight the epidemic in their workplaces.

"They need to get together and form consortia where they can meet and share ideas. HIV calls for us to be imaginative in our response; it cannot be business as usual," Whiteside said.

And while he was upbeat over big businesses' provision of antiretrovirals to their employees, he warned that they were not the solution.

"Focusing only on provision of antiretrovirals as a solution to our Aids problem is like mopping the floor while the tap is still running," he said, adding that the only way to ensure continued growth in the economy was to ensure there were skilled people to employ.

"The only way to do this is to focus on prevention," he said. ARV treatment would not ensure that people survived.

"In South Africa we have two lines of treatment, and when a person can no longer take these, they have no other choices available to them," Whiteside said.

"Aids is an opportunity for us to do things differently. We did it in 1994 by changing society, and we can do it again in 2006 in terms of Aids," he said.

Meanwhile Peter Babcock-Walters, of the mobile task team of Heard, cited studies he has made on the impact of HIV in the public sector to show that economic growth did not occur in a vacuum.

According to Babcock-Walters, between 1997/1998 and 2003/2004 the rate of mortality among those aged between 20 and 49 was double that of 50 to 59-year-olds.

Babcock-Walters said that while it was impossible to attribute all the deaths to HIV, it did show there were abnormal mortality rates, with younger people dying earlier.

"Our teachers are dying by the thousands, and if one considers that HIV prevalence among teachers is below the country prevalence, then we have a big problem."