JOHANNESBURG - AIDS is South Africa`s number one killer with nearly one in three people dying from the disease, according to a report obtained on Tuesday.
"This study shows ... that HIV/AIDS was the leading cause of death in all provinces except in the Western Cape," said the 190-page report compiled by South Africa`s Medical Research Council.
"One of the key findings of the report is that AIDS is the major cause of death in the country," added Debbie Bradshaw, director of the MRC`s Burden of Disease Research Unit.
The report based its findings on statistics drawn from the year 2000, which said that 30 percent of South Africans died of AIDS, while 33 percent of all deaths in its most populous province, Gauteng, were caused by the disease.
"Clearly HIV/AIDS is a major problem in South Africa," Bradshaw told AFP.
A report released in February by the official Statistics SA agency showed that tuberculosis accounted for the highest number of mortalities although officials admitted that these deaths could be linked to AIDS.
South Africa has the world`s highest AIDS caseload, with 5.3 million people, or an estimated one out of five adults living with HIV and AIDS, according to UN figures.
The report, the first to give provincial breakdowns of AIDS deaths placed the eastern KwaZulu-Natal province at the top of the list, with 41.5 percent of deaths caused by AIDS, followed by Mpumalanga with 40.7 percent and Gauteng ranking third.
"I think we are getting the picture reasonably correct," Bradshaw told the SAPA news agency. "There is some uncertainty because we don`t have the truth at hand to compare it against. We don`t think we are over- or under-stating the picture," she said.
Bradshaw said a better death registration system in the country would give the MRC a clearer picture of the cause of death.
In South Africa, doctors and hospitals often indicate tuberculosis or another AIDS-related opportunistic disease as the cause of death either because they do not know that a patient is HIV positive or to spare family and relatives from the stigma associated with AIDS.
"High death rates due to HIV/AIDS highlight the urgency to accelerate the implementation of the comprehensive plan for the prevention and treatment of HIV and AIDS," the report said.
President Thabo Mbeki`s government began rolling out free anti-retrovirals in November 2003, under pressure from AIDS activists who went to court to win an order against the government.
At least 42,000 South Africans are receiving ARVs under the government`s rollout program but the key AIDS lobby group, the Treatment Action Campaign, is urging the government to speed up the ARV rollout to make them available to 200,000 people by 2006.
05/17/2005 15:45 GMT