Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Apr 29 2005 (IPS) — Stephen Lewis, the U.N. Special Envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa, invariably returns to New York with half a dozen harrowing stories of death and devastation in a continent ravaged by the spreading disease.

During a visit to a village in the Zambian countryside a few weeks ago, he ran into an income-generating project run by a group of women stricken with AIDS.

”They were gathered under a large banner proclaiming their identity, some 15 or 20 women, all living with the virus, all looking after orphans,” Lewis recalled.

And they were standing proudly beside their only income-generating project, a bountiful cabbage patch.

After they had spoken about their needs and the needs of their children (as always, Lewis said, hunger led the litany), he asked them about the cabbages.

”I presumed it supplemented their diet? Yes, they chorused. And you sell the surplus at the market?” he asked.

And this time, he added, there was ”an almost quizzical response” as if to say: what kind of ridiculous question is that. ”We buy coffins, of course,” they replied. ”We never have enough coffins.”

As he recounted this story at a conference on women’s global health at the University of Pennsylvania last week, Lewis said that 20 years into the pandemic, AIDS still has ”a woman’s face.”

”Perhaps we should stop using that phrase now – which gained currency at the AIDS conference in Barcelona in 2002 – as though it has a revelatory dimension”, he said.

”The women of Africa have always known whose face it is that’s withered and aching from the virus,” he told the gathering.

In an interview with IPS, Lewis said the stories coming out of Africa are ”absolutely heart-wrenching.”

”I am beside myself about what’s happening to the women in Africa,” he said. ”It’s so desperately awful. I would never have thought that you could be decimating populations of women this way – and the world just stands and watches”.

Lewis said he thinks the disease has devastated Africa, which he oversees, more than any other region of the world.

When he traveled to four African countries recently, he saw a combination of famine and AIDS in Lesotho, Malawi, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

”We had surmised, at the outset, that we would be dealing primarily with drought and erratic rainfall. But in the field, it became apparent that to a devastating extent, agricultural productivity and household food security was being clobbered by AIDS,” Lewis said.

He said he heard the president of Botswana use the word ”extermination” when he described the battle against AIDS in his country.

Likewise, the prime minister of Lesotho used the word ”annihilation” to describe the same battle and the president of Zambia used the word ”holocaust” to describe what his country was going through.

”These words are true,” Lewis said, ”there’s no hyperbole. And the words apply, overwhelmingly, to women.”

U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan struck a similar chord in comments Thursday.

At a press conference in New Delhi, Annan said that during a meeting of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in India, he stressed several areas relating to the fight against AIDS, particularly mother-to-child transmission, ”the cruelest of all transmissions,” for a new-born child to arrive in this world infected with HIV/AIDS.

”We also need to look after the pregnant women to ensure that they do not pass it onto their children,” he said. ”That’s very easily done, with a pill that is available today.”

Annan said he was encouraging each government to come up with a comprehensive national programme for tackling the disease. He also was trying to assist, through the Global Fund for HIV/AIDS, Malaria and Tuberculosis.

In a report released before the U.N. Commission on Population and Development in early April, Annan said that since the first AIDS diagnosis in 1981, there have been more than 20 million deaths.

As of Dec. 2004, there were approximately 39.4 million people living with HIV, the virus that most scientists say causes AIDS. Rates of infection continue to rise, with an estimated 4.9 million people newly infected in 2004 alone, according to U.N. figures.

”The epidemic also continues to advance rapidly in Eastern Europe and Asia, with a staggering impact on health and on the social and economic stability of nations. AIDS is thus both an emergency and a long-term development issue,” Annan said.

The study also underlined the fact that the ”AIDS epidemic has insidiously been taking a toll on women and adolescent girls,” who account for nearly half of all people living with HIV worldwide and about 57 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. Women also represent the majority of people providing care to those with the disease.

The message emanating from the cumulative statistics on HIV/AIDS is clear, the study warned: as the HIV/AIDS epidemic continues to outpace efforts to halt it, no country is immune.

The report pointed out that one of the reasons why the AIDS epidemic is rapidly spreading is that ”there is no preventive vaccine, and treatment is inaccessible or unaffordable for most people.”