The Hidden Cost of AIDS
The pernicious plague, now spreading misery around the world at an alarming rate, may also plunder the global economy over the next decade
The grim reaper is always close at hand. But seldom has he swung his scythe so widely and brutally as in the AIDS epidemic, which is sending millions of victims to their death and may soon become the most costly and catastrophic plague in history. The Black Death killed about 25 million suffering souls in the 14th century. But by the year 2000, 30 million to 110 million people will be carrying HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, up from some 12 million today. In the absence of a cure, all face certain death. "At the present time," says William Haseltine, chief of the human retrovirology division at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, "there is nothing standing in the way of this happening."
The scourge of AIDS travels with impunity and without a passport--it respects no boundaries. Heterosexually transmitted HIV flows freely today in the sex parlors of Thailand, along the truck routes of India, around the sugar cane plantations of the Dominican Republic and in the copper mines of Zambia. A recent study by Harvard's Global AIDS Policy Coalition warns of 57 countries that risk major HIV outbreaks. In Southeast Asia, infections could surge from less than 10 percent to more than 40 percent of the world total by the year 2000.
The human pathos spawned by the AIDS pandemic is immediately apparent. But the worldwide economic cost of this vicious virus has been widely ignored. Until now. A team of U.S. News reporters, working with economist Nariman Behravesh of DRI/McGraw-Hill, has fed the latest epidemiological data for HIV and AIDS into a computer model of the global marketplace. The startling results show that by the year 2000 the epidemic could drain between $356 billion and $514 billion from the global economy. In the worst-case scenario, the dollar loss equals 1.4 percent of the entire world's gross domestic product. That's the equivalent of wiping out the economy of either Australia or India.
The devastating impact of AIDS will slam hardest the poor countries that can afford it least because their economies are already so small and their living standards so low. In the United States, for example, U.S. News estimates that the plague will siphon off between $81 billion and $107 billion by the year 2000--about 1 percent of gross domestic product. Africa and the Middle East, on the other hand, could be faced with AIDS-related losses ranging from 2.4 percent to 4.6 percent of GDP. And in Southeast Asia, the dread disease could slice 1.7 percent to 2.3 percent from GDP by the end of the decade. "AIDS is expected to retard much of the progress made in the late 1980s by countries like India," says DRI's Behravesh. "A 3-to-5 percent decline in their economies will be a significant setback."
Ravaged ranks. Behind these unsettling statistics lies a host of hidden costs not usually associated with AIDS--including lost labor and plummeting productivity. Thailand, for example, could lose up to $8.7 billion in income from people who are struck down by the virus in their prime productive years. India could forfeit a significant chunk of its adult male population to AIDS. And in Central Africa, the plague is now ravaging the scarce ranks of urban professionals. "Considering what it takes to make one neurosurgeon in a developing country and what it means to lose him is a very clear indication of the societalwide impact of AIDS," says Jonathan Mann, director of Harvard's International AIDS Center and chairman of this week's eighth annual international AIDS conference in Amsterdam.
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