Catherwood LibraryILR School

As the Fourteenth International AIDS Conference swung into high gear yesterday in Barcelona, Spain, the director of the World Health Organization?s HIV/AIDS department announced that several sub-Saharan African countries stand to lose over twenty-five percent of their workforces to AIDS by 2020. Seven such countries already have HIV infection rates of close to that number among their working-age populations, and without access to anti-retroviral drugs it is only a matter of time before these people will become unable to work due to the onset of full blown AIDS. Many countries are already feeling the burden of this workforce drain on their economic development and national infrastructures---in Kenya seventy-five percent of deaths among police officers are due to AIDS, and in Swaziland 13,000 teachers will be lost to AIDS in the next seventeen years.