PROF: CARIBBEAN SECOND TO AFRICA IN HIV/AIDS

UNAIDS IN Southern Africa states that by the year 2010, life expectancy of Africans will plummet from 59 years to 45 years due to the drastic increase of HIV/ AIDS cases in Africa. This statistic formed part of the address by Prof Barry Chevanees, Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences, and Prof of Social Anthropology, University of the West Indies (UWI), Jamaica at a symposium on Gender Sexuality and the implications for substance use and HIV/ AIDS. The seminar was hosted by the Centre for Gender and Development Studies of the University of the West Indies at the UWI Learning Resource Centre on Friday.

Chevanees added that at the rate which the disease is spreading, entire tribes and nations will face extinction, unless the spread is halted and reversed. No cure has yet been discovered, he said but the use of anti retroviral drugs which could reverse the rate which people die is restricted by their prohibitive cost which are still outside the reach of the countries that are most affected, not withstanding the unilateral actions of Brazil and South Africa in making the drugs available to their respective populations at generic cost. Chevanees said in the Caribbean the adult prevalence rate of HIV/AIDS epidemic runs second to Africa.

UNAIDS tells us that prevalence rate in the Caribbean islands as a whole, excluding Puerto Rico, is estimated at between 1.9 percent and 3.1 percent. He gave some statistics: in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago and the Dominican Republic it is 2.5 percent, in the Commonwealth of Bahamas 3.5 percent. In Barbados and Jamaica 1.2 percent. At the end of 2003 the estimated number of people known to be infected with the virus was under 600,000. The country hit the hardest is Haiti where the prevalence rate is now 6.1 percent up from 5.17 percent years ago.

He emphasised that there was no single factor which if secured could arrest the spread of HIV/ AIDs. He emphasised that life-style changes are clearly the order of the day and as much as these are premised on cultural identities, knowing and accepting ourselves become important starting points.He warned that those who think that HIV/AIDS is Africa’s problem, the fruit of its own failures and immorality, had better think again. The incidence rates are increasing rapidly in the east- Eastern Europe, India and China. No one is immune.