Dead by 40 as AIDS grips Africa

BARCELONA, Spain -- The average life expectancy of people living in 11 African countries will drop below 40 by 2010 because of HIV/AIDS, research suggests.

"By 2010, we project that life expectancies in these countries will be back to levels that have not been seen since the nineteenth century," said the U.S. Census Bureau's Karen Stanecki at the start of an international conference in Barcelona.

"Unfortunately, many African countries are only beginning to see the impact of high levels of HIV prevalence."

The prediction, at the start of the International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, came as American company VaxGen said it could have a vaccine in production within five years. (Full story)

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Stanecki's "middle-case scenario" report, which assumes that the epidemic will begin to level off in Africa over the next eight years, predicts that the average life expectancy in Botswana and Mozambique will drop to just 27 years.

Swaziland will see an average of 33 years and Zimbabwe, Zambia and Namibia 34 years.

Angola, Lesotho, Malawi and Rwanda and Mali will see life expectancy drop to the mid- to late 30s.

Without AIDS, average life in southern African countries such as Botswana, Namibia and Swaziland would have been around 70 years by 2010, the report shows.

Instead, deaths will outstrip births in five countries by 2010, meaning falling populations.

Without AIDS, Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho, Swaziland and South Africa would have expected a population growth rate of at least two percent.

About 14,000 doctors, scientists and activists from around the world were expected to attend the 14th International AIDS Conference to discuss the epidemic, which has infected approximately 40 million people worldwide.

Another study presented at the conference found that the percentage of newly diagnosed patients infected with drug-resistant forms of HIV is increasing.

That increase limits the effectiveness of anti-AIDS drugs, the study concluded -- a trend that worries researchers.

"People are increasingly becoming infected with a virus that is difficult to treat," Dr. Frederick Hecht, of the University of California at San Francisco, reported.

The spread of a drug-resistant virus threatens treatment advances that have been credited in recent years with transforming AIDS/HIV from a fatal disease -- one where survival was measured in years -- to a chronic illness with survival potentially measured in decades.

AIDS has claimed 21.8 million lives, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, where access to drugs is limited

Among other issues at the Barcelona conference, participants will hear about new compounds that attack the virus in a different way and will learn about the latest vaccine test results.

"There are three main messages that can emerge from the conference -- simplification of therapy, new families of compounds and therapeutic vaccines," Dr. Jose Gatell, a co-chair of the conference, told Reuters news agency.

Prevention of AIDS is expected to be the second major focus of the week-long Barcelona conference.

With the rapid spread of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and emerging epidemics in China, India and eastern Europe, there is a wide consensus that more effective preventive measures are needed.