Aids runs riot as Zimbabwe scratches in the dirt

The HIV/Aids epidemic gripping Zimbabwe looked set to spiral further out of control yesterday as it emerged that President Robert Mugabe's Government is running out of anti-retroviral drugs needed to treat those infected with the virus.

Efforts to provide tens of thousands of people with the life-saving medicine are failing as a shortage of foreign currency prevents the National Pharmaceutical Company, Zimbabwe's chief drugs repository, from distributing the anti-retrovirals, the state-run Herald newspaper reported.

"There are 20,000 people on the ARVs national programme and we have less than a month's supply of the vital drugs and that is not encouraging," Charles Mwaramba, the company's acting director, told a parliamentary committee.

Zimbabwe's struggling health sector has been badly damaged by a severe economic crisis which has seen the inflation rate soar to 913 per cent. Shortages of money, fuel, food, water and electricity have brought the once prosperous country to its knees.

An estimated 1.8 million of Zimbabwe's 12 million population are infected with HIV/AIDS. Of that group, 295,000 need anti-retroviral treatment immediately, but only 8000 - less than 3 per cent - are receiving it, according to a recent WHO report.

With an average of 3000 people dying each week from Aids, the news that the already dwindling supply of anti-retroviral drugs is on the point of drying up was greeted with horror in Zimbabwe yesterday.

For the estimated 1.61 million people infected, the future now looks even more bleak than before.

Many people, like Lazarus Zhuwao, whose brother, Emmanuel, is dying of the virus, blame President Mugabe's erratic and destructive policies for making their deaths inevitable.

After his brother tested HIV positive last year, Zhuwao was told by a doctor that Emmanuel should start to take anti-retroviral drugs.

Zhuwao said he would have sold any of his meagre belongings to buy the ARVs, but there weren't any available. When he took Emmanuel to the main hospital in Harare, he was prescribed Panadol.

Zhuwao said he was surprised by reports that Zimbabwe was running out of ARVs: "It seemed there have long been none at all," he said.

Owing to acute foreign currency shortages, Zimbabwe has been unable to import ARVs and now has roughly a month's supply left. An AIDs activist for a prominent NGO, who declined to have her name published, said drugs donated from abroad were insufficient to cater for those in need.

"State hospitals and clinics here are death chambers. People go there to die," she said. "They [state hospitals] don't have the drugs nor the staff to administer these drugs. People are dying like flies, particularly in the rural areas where Aids is worsened by poverty and malnutrition."

Mwaramba, whose organisation serves as the country's main drugs repository, said yesterday National Pharmaceutical Company had been allocated just US$106,000 for ARVs by the central Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe between January and March instead of the US$7.4 million it required.

"We understand that drugs are also competing with other items like fuel for foreign currency but the picture is not encouraging," he said.

Zimbabwe's economy has been in free-fall since Mugabe expelled more than 4000 white farmers and confiscated their land for redistribution in February 2000. Most of the repatriated land is now lying fallow and four million Zimbabweans are being fed by the World Food Programme.

Catholic Archibishop Pius Ncube, who regularly visits Zimbabwe, recently estimated that more than 300,000 people could have died due to the Aids epidemic and hunger in rural areas in recent years.

Mugabe's Government, however, maintains that no one in Zimbabwe has died of hunger, and boasts it has managed to reduce new Aids infections by 20 per cent, a claim denied by doctors and activists.

"The fact is that this country remains in crisis and this Government must eat humble pie and call for major international humanitarian assistance to deal with Aids, poverty and malnutrition," said one junior state doctor, who wanted to remain anonymous.

- INDEPENDENT