Although Malawi saw a decline in HIV/Aids prevalence rates from 18 percent in 1997 to 14 percent in 2005, the numbers still are relatively high for the sub-Saharan African country, according to a recent study conducted here.
The 2006 Poverty and Vulnerability Assessment (PVA) done jointly by the World Bank and Malawi’s National Statistics Office said that Aids remained the leading cause of death among people aged 20-49 years in the country.
As a result, Malawi’s life expectancy has dropped to 37 years due to the pandemic that has no known cure. Without the epidemic, life expectancy would have been 55 in the country.
The Director for HIV/Aids and Nutrition in the President’s Office, Mary Shawa, told journalists in Lilongwe ahead of World Aids Day on 1 December levels of HIV/Aids awareness in Malawi are very high despite the setback in fighting it.
Shawa said almost 100 percent of those sampled in the Ministry of Health’s 2000 Malawi Demographic and Health Survey (MDHS) reported that they had heard about the pandemic and how it was caused.
But « government has put in place a number of strategies to reduce the levels of the pandemic in the country, » she added.
For instance, she said, through the National Aids Commission a lot of programmes were being implemented from the household, community, district and national levels in order to reduce the deadly disease.
Other Southern African countries with HIV/Aids prevalent rates higher than 14 percent include Swaziland, Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, the study showed.
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