The Epidemic Of South Africa

When visiting South Africa, I was intrigued at the beauty of the country, but was also curious as to how the country was dealing with one of Africa’s largest problems, AIDS/HIV. With the AIDS epidemic having started over 25 years ago, the disease continues to affect the population of Africa, especially South Africa, the nation with 5.6 million people living with HIV, the most in the world. Much of South Africa’s history of struggle with the virus is attributed to misinformation given by Thabo Mbeki, a former president, who “questioned the link between HIV and AIDS” and his former health minister who misled the nation with ideas that the virus could be treated with “beets and

There are an immense amount of problems in Africa caused by the AIDS disease. Healthcare providers are available and located all over Africa. Even though they are available, they have only “enough medicine for long-term survival available for 30,000 Africans” (Copson, 3).

The world as a whole should be mortified by what is happening in Sub-Saharan Africa. In places like Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho poverty, crime and systematic corruption are the tinder for the fire that is the HIV epidemic in Africa.

In The Invisible Cure, Helen Epstein talks about why HIV/AIDS rate is so high in Africa compared to the rest of the world. Through the book, she gives us an account of the disease and the struggles that many health experts and ordinary Africans went through to understand this disease, and how different African countries approached the same problem differently. Through this paper, I will first address the different ways Uganda and Southern African countries, South Africa and Botswana in particular, dealt with this epidemic, and then explain how we can use what we have learned from these African countries to control outbreaks of communicable disease elsewhere around the world.

330,000 under-15s living with HIV in 2009. This clearly shows that majority of the children in South Africa are with HIV/AIDS , this can effect a child’s availability to learn in school or even attend in the first place. Poor nutrition does not help this pandemic either as this can have an even worse affect. When under weight the immune system is even weaker and is not able to fight away diseases. Awareness of HIV/AIDs should be put in place in order to stop this disease from spreading. If children are not attending school due to HIV/AIDS it is hard for them to have better quality of life later on. Also leading to another point this does not help the countries economy as most of the workforces are dying. Food deficiency has considerable effects on whether individuals remain on treatment. Various people living with HIV in South Africa are unable to access nutritious food, which can result in malnutrition. Malnutrition can impact significantly on both a person’s ability to adhere to treatment and on the effectiveness of antiretroviral drugs.

In recently, the HIV and AIDS are rapidly spread in world societies in early 1980 and found it from America in 1981. However, human societies were still not able to realize the exact reason for HIV. Each year this disease kills millions of people around the world. This virus devastated so many continents, such as Africa, North America, Latin America, and some parts of Asia. The reason why the virus has devastated lots of people was because of the lack of AIDS knowledge and education program and most serious HIV/AIDS epidemic in the world. Especially, Sub-Saharan African has high rates of HIV epidemic, “an estimated 24.7 million people were living with HIV, accounting for 71% of the global total. In the same year, there were an estimated 1.5 million new HIV infections and 1.1 million AIDS-related

Just about two decades ago, HIV/AIDS pandemic was the only thing that is mentioned in social media (Gus “Introduction to HIV/AIDS”). Proved to be originally from Sub Saharan Africa (S.S Africa) region, HIV/AIDS has spread throughout not only the S.S. Africa, but it eventually becomes the global disaster in the late 20th century (Gus). HIV/AIDS has gained attention from the media when the death many patients by the new emerging disease is reported in Europe and US (Satpathy 27). However, these cases directly refer to S.S. Africa because infected patients either are originally from or have travelled around this region (Satpathy 28). In addition, out of 1000 blood samples result taken in Kinshasa in 1970s, scientists have found HIV positive among these blood sample (Satpathy 28). This means that HIV/AIDS have been circulating around this region for at least 10 to 12 years since HIV is an asymptomatic disease (Satpathy 41). However, the HIV/AIDS only becomes an epidemic in S.S. Africa around the late 20th century, shown in statistics that are taken from UNAIDS: Progress Report 1996-1997. Many people blame the poverty in S.S.Africa as the cause for letting this deadly disease out of control. Others criticize the African government for avoiding the responsibility of suppressing this epidemic. Certainly, in order to prevent a further pandemic, we need to study the actual explanation of this epidemic. This arises the question: Why did HIV/AIDS become an epidemic in the late 20th

Just as clearly, experience shows that the right approaches, applied quickly enough with courage and resolve, can and do result in lower HIV infection rates and less suffering for those affected by the epidemic. An ever-growing AIDS epidemic is not inevitable; yet, unless action against the epidemic is scaled up drastically, the damage already done will seem minor compared with what lies ahead. This may sound dramatic, but it is hard to play down the effects of a disease that stands to kill more than half of the young adults in the countries where it has its firmest hold—most of them before they finish the work of caring for their children or providing for their elderly parents. Already, 18.8 million people around the world have died of AIDS, 3.8 million of them children. Nearly twice that many—34.3 million—are now living with HIV, the virus [9].

With the spread of disease country to country being as simple as a plane ticket from one place to another, it has become increasingly obviously that countries must support one another in development of adequate health care structures and in prevention and management of devastating illnesses. In doing so, the advancement of global health is attainable.

​Today, in the world, especially African Countries in the South are facing an epidemic that has gone completely ignored by their very own government. Instead of proposing policies directed towards reducing the amount of HIV/AIDS cases that continue to rise each year, they have chosen to implement failed policies or none at all. Countries that have attempted to enact government policy to try to decrease the spread of the epidemic has ultimately failed in a broad sense. The epidemic is known as the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (AIDS) and the virus Human Immune Deficiency Virus (HIV) (…). For this research paper, the countries of Botswana, South Africa, and Zimbabwe will be each contrasted to Rwanda. the Southern African Countries’ mentioned previously HIV/AIDS rates are among the highest in Africa because of the lack of government action; whereas Rwanda’s rate of infection is among the lowest. Questions that should be answered by the end of this research paper will be, “Which Southern African Countries’ policies are more effective and why are some more effective than others? Is this perhaps a measure of state capacity?”

Since the nineteen hundreds, Africa coped with countless problems related to HIV and AIDS. Anthropologists, scientists, doctors, and psychologists discussed theories related to the issues presented by HIV/AIDS. Researchers study the effects of poverty, polygamy, geography, and social relationships on HIV/AIDS. One of the prevalent theories on how the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) spread is through the increase of sex workers in Africa. An increase in sex work correlates to an increase in poverty. Due to the economy and culture, women turned to sex working as a way of acquiring income. In order to reduce HIV contraction among sex workers and their clients, a change in intervention methods and legislation is needed to protect the rights of those in poverty and stop the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Disease is one of the primary concerns in South Africa today. The distribution of disease can be divided into three categories. Communicable disease accounts for 60.5%, non-intentional injuries 11.2% and non-communicable for 28.4% of the distribution of disease (WHO, 2010, South Africa: health statistics profile 2010). The leading causes of disease in South Africa are human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS), tuberculosis, violence, and road accidents (WHO, 2010, health statistics profile 2010).HIV/AIDS has the highest cause of disease by accounting for 40.7% of the diseased population. Tuberculosis follows afterwards with 5.4%, violence at 4.8%, and road traffic accident at 2.6% (WHO, 2010, health

Sub-Saharan Africa has been singled out as having the most serious HIV epidemic in the world. There is need to curb the spread of HIV in the continent by leveraging the knowledge and skills necessary to understand the factors responsible for the spread of the disease. This paper attempts to investigate the risk factors involved in the spread of HIV and how to reduce HIV prevalence regardless of these risks factors. The paper then goes a step further and explains how HIV might may- and might may not - be contained. The paper concludes by proposing measures to help curb the spread of HIV/AIDS in Africa.

HIV/AIDS remains one of the most highly known communicable diseases in South Africa (Avert, 2015). In addition to the 6.2 million people currently living with HIV, World Health Organization (2015) states that 200,000 lives are claimed every year, and the numbers are constantly rising. South Africa currently still remains the continent most greatly affected by HIV/AIDS (Lewis, 2011). This paper will focus on the aspects of HIV and AIDS in regards to nature of the problem, the affected population and risk factors, as well as the social and economic consequences the country faces with interventions that can be implemented to decrease the transmission of disease.

In South African countries sexual behavior in youth has been changing significantly over the course of the last decade. It seems that all the control