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AIDS Now Leading Killer of Young Adults in EthiopiaSat July 5, 2003 04:26 PM ET By Alan Mozes NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - AIDS is now the cause of nearly 70 percent of deaths that occur annually in men and women between the ages of 20 and 54 in Ethiopia, according to a survey conducted in the capital city of Addis Ababa. "This would translate to 7,000 to 9,000 adults," said Dr. Eduard J. Sanders of the Ethiopian Health and Nutrition Research Institute in Addis Ababa. AIDS has been a major health concern in Ethiopia for nearly two decades, according to his team's report in the journal AIDS. UNICEF estimates that, as of 2001, 2.1 million Ethiopians younger than 49 were infected with HIV or had full-blown AIDS. The first Ethiopian AIDS patient was identified in Addis Ababa in 1986. In a poverty-stricken country lacking reliable national birth and death records, Sanders and his colleagues set out to estimate the number and various causes of death in Addis Ababa -- a city of approximately 2.6 million -- between 1987 and 2001. To conduct the study, the researchers checked registries and interviewed staff at a sampling of five of the 70 official burial sites located in the city. In February 2001, Sanders and his team began surveillance -- currently ongoing -- of all 70 burial sites. The researchers found that since the mid-1980s the number of people ages 25 to 49 who had been buried had increased dramatically. In particular, deaths among men and women between the ages of 35 and 39 had increased approximately five-fold between 1984 and 2001. Much of the increase was due to AIDS, and young men and women in Addis Ababa now have a roughly 18 percent chance of dying from HIV before the age of 60, according to the report. They calculate that a 15-year-old boy's chance of dying before the age of 60 increased from 23 percent in 1984 to almost 42 percent by 2001, largely due to AIDS. For girls, the probability has jumped from 17 percent to 35 percent during the same time. Sanders told Reuters Health that since the researchers are measuring the impact of new HIV infections over the prior decade it will be important to continue burial surveillance of this kind for a few more years. He noted that the Addis Ababa project is currently funded by the AIDS Foundation -- based in Amsterdam -- through 2006. "The project will contribute to a better understanding of the impact of HIV/AIDS on society and will help in the planning for other HIV/AIDS public health interventions," Sanders said. According to UNICEF, AIDS deaths in Ethiopia have left an estimated 990,000 children under the age of 14 orphaned, while across Africa, AIDS has taken the lives of one or both parents of almost 11 million children.
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