In One Country, AIDS on the Rampage . . . - New York Times

In One Country, AIDS on the Rampage . . . - New York Times: "When I arrived in Swaziland in 1999, no one even wanted to call AIDS by its name. “Silwane,” people whispered, using a siSwati word for a fearsome animal, “Silwane got him.” Others said it was witchcraft.

In some measure, it was the failure of Swaziland to recognize the disease that gave it the world’s highest prevalence of H.I.V. More than 17,000 people in this tiny kingdom nestled in the hills of southern Africa have been dying each year of AIDS, in a population of about one million. At last count in 2004, 56 percent of pregnant women ages 25 to 29 had H.I.V.

The ascent was swift. H.I.V. prevalence among pregnant women was less than 4 percent in 1992, when the takeoff began, 16 percent in 1994, 26 percent two years after that, and upward ever since. H.I.V. bides its time, leaving young women looking beautiful and men feeling lusty for years before it wears down their immune systems and the debilitating infections of AIDS appear.

That has meant plenty of opportunity for those with H.I.V. to spread the virus unknowingly, and sometimes knowingly. Policies imported from the West haven’t helped to encourage widespread testing."