Lyndon VanderZanden

September 22, 2005

Hour 8

Revised Essay

Africa is made up of 54 countries, over 1,000 languages, and around 800 million people. It is a continent filled with grandeur, beauty, and wonder. It is also home to inescapable disease and relentless poverty. Every year millions upon millions of Africans die because of the horrendous conditions that they are forced to live in. These conditions can be changed if steps to create an international effort are taken by the major global powers. The time for action has come and the entire world must stand up to the occasion.

The present conditions within Africa can be directly linked to the socio-economic characteristics of the continent’s nations. The level of health within each nation is greatly affected by theses socio-economic factors. When an economy fails, it’s society crumbles and falls into a depression resulting in high unemployment rates and increasing poverty. If allowed to continue long enough, these effects can become almost irreversible. The beginning of Africa’s economic depression hit the continent in the 1980s. Following considerable progress in social health care in the 1970s, most expected the 1980s to be the turning point for Africa. Those expectaions where crushed when the social progress gained in the previous century quickly collapsed. Slowly but surely, each sub-saharan nation was forced to turn to the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund for loans after their economies began failing them. Now surrounded by debt and forced to cut most of the spending on health care, Africa began its descent to depression.

As depression set in and the nations of Africa faced overwhelming poverty, HIV/AIDS it’s first wave of destruction. Without proper health care the disease spread rapidly in the 1980s, managing to spread to every corner of Africa by decades end leaving only more poverty in its wake. A charcteristic of such poverty is the existence of undiagnosed and untreated STDs which is now recognized as a very significant co-factor in the transmission of HIV/AIDS. Poor households typically have few if any financial or other assets and are often politically and socially ignored. These conditions of social exclusion increase the problems of providing these populations with programs aimed at changing sexual behaviors and medical treatment.

As the epidemic continued few efforts were taken to at the very least slow it down. Between 1982 and 2002 over 15 million Africans died from HIV/AIDS and it is only going to get worse. Every day AIDS kills approximately 6,300 Africans, and infects 11,000 more. To make matters worse the infant mortality rate has skyrocketed due in part to the 1.9 million children that are infected with HIV. As a result the disease has managed to drop the average life expectancy to an average of 47 years old. Without any knowledge of the disease, the symptoms, or how its spreads from one person to another, the people of Africa don’t have a chance to prevent future generations from also being infected.  If immediate action isn’t taken another 15 to 20 million more people are going to die of AIDS before 2010. It is also estimated that by that time Botswana, Mozambique, Lesotho, South Africa, and Swaziland will experience negative population growth due to the AIDS virus.

The catastrophic effects of HIV/AIDS on Africa and its people are unparalleled. Nowhere else can an epidemic such as this be found. Africa accounts for over eighty percent of AIDS deaths worldwide and nearly seventy percent of the world’s HIV-positive population live in the sub-Saharan nations of Africa. It is because of this that the United Nations has made many attempts to put more focus on the dilemma. For a time the creation of UNAIDS brought the attention of the world towards the problem but it failed to keep it. In an attempt to combat the rampant disease UNAIDS has tried to work closely with many African nations as well as other countries from around the world in order to fund educational tools and provide medical assistance to many parts of Africa. However without international backing these efforts have made almost no progress. In order to see real results an international effort must be organized if substantial progress is to be made.