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More than 6.2 million South Africans were infected by HIV or AIDS by last year, an increase of 700,000 from 2003.

Though women in their mid- to late-20s were the hardest hit by the pandemic, “it was observed that there have been increases in prevalence across all age groups between 2003 and 2004,” a new Health Ministry report said on Monday.

The findings of the annual survey cast doubt over other statistics on HIV and AIDS by government’s official supplier Statistics South Africa (StatsSA) on the country’s most pressing health challenge, with a difference of more than 1.5 million.

The annual survey based on blood samples from more than 16,000 pregnant women nationwide showed that between 6.29 million and 6.57 million people were living with AIDS or HIV in the country of 47 million.

Nearly 40 per cent of women aged between 25 and 29 years are HIV positive while women in their early 20s and early 30s show prevalence rates of around 30 per cent, it added.

“Higher rates of increase between 2003 and 2004 are observed among women aged from 25 to 34 years,” the report said. “This age group is also associated with higher fertility and the time when the majority of women begin to have children.”

South Africa has one of the world’s biggest AIDS caseloads with the UN AIDS agency estimating in 2003 that 5.3 million people were infected, or one in five adults living with the HIV virus or full-blown AIDS.

Based on its latest survey, the Health Ministry said 29.5 per cent of pregnant women attending government clinics last year were HIV positive, up from 27.9 per cent in 2003 and 26.5 in 2002.

“This suggests that although HIV prevalence has tended towards stabilization in recent years, there is still a minor increase,” it added.

But Health Ministry spokesman Sibani Mngadi said government was “definitely worried that there has been such an increase.”

“We need to see how we are going to address this,” he said, adding that government had scaled up its AIDS budget by 45 per cent and increased the number of treatment sites for anti-retrovirals to 143 nationwide.

South Africa’s most influential AIDS lobby group, the Treatment Action Campaign, described that latest figures as a “disaster” and called for an urgent meeting of all parties to try to stop new infections.

“It really is a disaster when we are now talking about 6.5 million people with HIV infection,” TAC spokesman Mark Heywood said.

“This is an indictment of the whole of South African society: government, business, trade unions, ourselves…”

The total was far higher than the estimate of 4.5 million given by StatsSA.

Health spokesman Mngadi attributed the discrepancy in government figures to a “difference in methodology used by the Health Department and StatsSA.”

Mandela in HIV plea to youth

Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s former president, urged people to fight AIDS by using condoms and waiting until their late teens to have sex as figures suggested that more than 6 million South Africans are infected with the AIDS virus.

“AIDS has spread because people have so many partners,” Mandela was quoted as saying by the South African Press Association.

“People should use condoms and try to resist being with a partner until about 18 or 19 years old.”

Mandela was speaking at his Johannesburg foundation, where he introduced four new ambassadors for his HIV/AIDS awareness campaign.

But the method of survey has been criticized by some African countries for exaggerating the spread of HIV/AIDS on the continent. Debate flared in Kenya last year, where the United Nations AIDS agency, UN AIDS, was accused of inflating the numbers infected.

Source: China Daily