Impact of HIV/AIDS
In Uganda HIV/AIDS has affected both rural and urban dwellers, adults and children and the impacts cut across regions and occupational groups in the country with varying magnitude. HIV/AIDS, especially in resource-constrained settings, results in physical and psychological suffering of the infected and eventually the affected. Consequently HIV/AIDS morbidity and mortality has negatively affected development initiatives at individual, household, sector and eventually national levels as individual and household savings are depleted to access care for the sick while income inflows from affected adults are cut off due to sickness and attending to the sick.
Since 1982 when the country's first cases of HIV were detected on the shores of Lake Victoria in Rakai district, cumulatively an estimated 2.6 million Uganda have been infected and 1.6 million have lost their lives to HIV/AIDS related illnesses including 76,000 in 2005 alone. For many years, AIDS has been and is still a leading cause of adult disease and deaths. It is the fourth leading cause of under-5 mortality, directly influencing the realization of MDG goals. Adult life expectancy currently is at 48.9 years (50 years for females and 48 years for males) yet it is projected to have been 56.9 years without AIDS. AIDS is cited among the leading causes of poverty in the country.
There is increased morbidity due to the upsurge of opportunistic infections some of which requiring even more complex expensive treatments than can be afforded. Reviews have established that 50-70% of hospital admissions are HIV related. HIV has ignited the upsurge of an equally threatening tuberculosis epidemic. About 50-60% of TB cases are co-infected with HIV.
Most of the AIDS deaths occur among men and women of childbearing age resulting in unmanageable increases of Orphan and Vulnerable Children (OVCs).
The NHSBS
estimated a total of 2.18 million Ugandan orphans by end of 2005. About 47% of these and 81% of the 567,700 dual orphans are due to AIDS.
UNAIDS estimated over 880,000 children below 14 years AIDS orphaned by AIDS in the country constituting about 51% of all orphans of that age by 2000. Results from a national action research study of 2002 reflected that communities perceive orphan care among the greatest burdens of the epidemic. HIV/AIDS has increased the costs on drugs, human capacity development and expenditure in the health sector generally due to the increasing demands from HIV-related ailments yet limited access to health care facilities makes the epidemic more devastating at individual level.
The epidemic was, in the year 2000, declared a security and development crisis in the country that demands for inclusion on the agendas of all development efforts.
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