El Sida En El Mundo.

Article Review
Aids Action in Africa
AIDS takes an economic and social toll.

Aids has been a controversial topic ever since it’s widespread in the 80’s. The fact that it is sexually transmitted and that it was originally related to homosexuals (probably because they had more un- protected sex) has caused it to become a taboo and as the infected with the disease have been harshlydiscriminated. This article evaluates the impact of aids in Africa at a socio-economical level and its making seems to be of an informative nature. It speaks mainly about the economic impact this disease has and emphasizes on its weight on the African economy. It basically says it is very harmful at a household level as the costs of the disease leave many families without the opportunity to save money andinvest in the future and the fact that the death of family heads leaves many teenagers in charge of raising their siblings, making them drop school and reducing the amount of skilled labour and economic growth. The data collected seems to be very reliable as it comes from many sources all of which seem to have no biased motives. Amongst this researchers we can find the UN development program, UNprogram of AIDS, the Botswana Institute of Policy Analysis, Alan Whiteside , Peter Badcock and the University of Harvard. Their validity comes from their high reputation and the similarity of their results.
This investigation raises important arguments on why aids can negatively impact the economy, amongst this we can find ; the high costs of medication cause people to spend their money on themwhich means savings are reduced, loss of skilled labour and educative investment due to professionals and unskilled workers who die, elevated costs in health as the article says “up to 80 per cent of hospital beds in Zambia and Zimbabwe (as well as Côte d’Ivoire) are occupied by HIV-positive patients” and the loss of productivity due to the high rate of funerals and the physical weakness of farmworkers.

Additionally, education is also very negatively affected due to aids. This is because the high costs of AIDS force parents who are infected to keep their children working with them, as they cannot afford school costs such as uniforms and books. This can be supported with statistics that indicate that areas which are more affected by HIV, have lower attendance rates than those which are notas heavily affected. Education is also negatively affected, as the disease is also very popular amongst teachers, whose services are becoming more demanded as the disease kills thousands of them every year. Also as explained before the lack of stability in the workforce due to their high death rate lowers foreign investment as costs of operating in Africa become very high as they constantly haveto spend money training new workers to keep their companies running. The article cites an example of a power down in Zambia because the power plant facilities did not have enough engineers to keep them running.

We can then conclude several things from this article, such as; the difficulty of stopping propagation due to the lack of resources and the poor education people have, the decrease ineconomic growth because of the death of skilled labour and hospital costs, the instability of families due to the high rates of family heads death and also that the virus grows fast and is exponentially increasing the percentage of the population it has infected.

This article has very clear and easy to understand information. It presents an issue and then supports it with abundant research anddata, which gives it credibility and helps explain the gravity of the issue at hand and the measures being taken to prevent the spread of this disease from increasing. Articles like this are very important. They give the world a clear view of what’s going on and helps create awareness, as many people are not educated in the subject. Our society is not conscious enough about this problem and that’s...