HIV/AIDS impacts on population dynamics and economic growth

Top officials at the United Nations Commission on Population and Development, at its yearly meeting are focussing on the negative effects of HIV/AIDS on population dynamics, including population losses and decreased life expectancy, as well as the pandemic's links to increased extreme poverty, stalled economic growth and poor reproductive health in many parts of the world.

The Commission's special focus this year on population, development and HIV/AIDS, with particular emphasis on poverty, was highlighted by Jose Antonio Ocampo, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, who reflected on the dramatic scope of the deadly disease, which kills over 3 million people a year.

He said that since the United Nations adopted the Declaration of Commitment on HIV/AIDS in 2001, the epidemic continues to expand, with both rich and poor countries being affected, with the poorest countries in the world being the hardest-hit. Currently, over 40 million people are living with HIV, at least 25 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa. The Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halting or reversing the spread of HIV is crucial for the development prospects of many countries and constant vigilance and sustained effort was demanded.

Effective prevention programmes to reduce mother-to-child transmission, were still far from being universal and more also had to be done to expand access to anti-retroviral treatment.

The action plan adopted by the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) if fully implemented could greatly contribute to helping reduce the spread of the disease, particularly by ensuring that people got the information and means to protect themselves.

Thoraya Obaid, Executive Director of the UN Population Fund (UNFPA), said that international strategies would be more effective if HIV/AIDS and reproductive health and family planning were linked, as appropriate. That would allow women at the community level to benefit directly from such services, and the services would reach the most vulnerable group of women and young people. National plans and budgets, including health-sector reforms and poverty-reduction strategies need to reflect these needs and address the realities they faced.

Obaid also says that poverty, human rights violations and gender inequalities that drive the epidemic among women, must be confronted.

Hannah Zlotnick, the Director of the UN Population Division, says 45 out of every 100 young people in the developing world today lived in countries that were already highly affected by the HIV/AIDS epidemic and even if all new infections could be prevented as of today, the expected toll of the disease would hardly change over the next decade because of the large number of persons already infected.

By 2050 the world’s poorest countries would have larger youth populations and this was possibly a highly productive resource, provided the least developed countries can contain HIV/AIDS, provide the requisite health and welfare facilities, education and training, with employment opportunities, says Om Pradhan, Chief of Policy Development and Coordination at the UN.

All those factors make it extremely difficult for the poorest countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the goals set out in the 2001 Brussels Programme of Action, which had called for appropriate health care for all individuals no later than 2015 and making available the widest achievable range of family planning and contraceptive methods.