Maputo — More than half of the funds for health activities in Mozambique are channelled to the fight against HIV/AIDS, according to Health Minister Alexandre Manguele.

Speaking at a Maputo Forum on the "Economic Impact of HIV/AIDS", Manguele put the total annual health budget at 138.7 million US dollars - but the HIV/AIDS area swallowed 78 million dollars

He recognised that the main problem for health care in the country has always been under-financing. People still had to walk long distances to the nearest health unit, the country was chronically short of ambulances, and faced a high maternal mortality rate - but resources had to be channelled away from these problems to meet the threat of AIDS.

Manguele admitted that "nobody is satisfied" with the results from the massive advertising campaigns on AIDS, "but if we hadn't done that advertising the situation would have been much worse".

The number of people receiving the life-prolonging anti-retroviral drugs has now reached around 250,000 - but Manguele acknowledged that of the estimated 1.4 million HIV-positive Mozambicans, some 650,000 had now reached the stage in the disease when they ought to be receiving anti-retrovirals.

Salim Vala, Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Planning and Development, said that between 2000 and 2010 about 100 million dollars was spent because of losses of staff caused by HIV/AIDS. Highly skilled personnel died at the height of their careers, and had to be replaced. Thus resources that could have been spent on other development areas were used to make good the losses caused by AIDS.

In agriculture alone, 1,700 extensionists and other skilled workers died of AIDS-related causes between 2004 and 2010, Vala said. He estimated that the AIDS epidemic had knocked one per cent per year off Mozambique's economic growth rate.

Romeu Rodrigues, the chairperson of the Association of Businesses against AIDS (ECOSIDA), stressed the impact of the disease in robbing companies of skilled and experienced workers. On the Mozambican labour market it was difficult to find replacements for people with 10 or 15 years of experience who fell victim to AIDS.

Rodrigues noted that there is still considerable "AIDS denial" among people who are HIV-positive. He recalled a worker in his company, the building firm CETA, who recently died of AIDS, but who insisted that he was only suffering from diabetes.

One bright spot was that 720 companies were now members of ECOSIDA, and 120,000 of their workers have been involved in HIV/AIDS awareness programmes.

Economist Constantino Marrengula warned that, because it struck down people of productive age, AIDS could have an impact on the competitiveness of the Mozambican economy. With all the costs that AIDS imposed on households, companies and the state, "the level of savings in the economy, already low, will drop still further".

The latest statistics on HIV/AIDS, published last year, after the first genuinely national survey, with a sample of over 18,000 people, showed an HIV prevalence rate of 11.5 per cent among people aged between 15 and 49. But there was a sharp gender difference - the prevalence rate among women was 13.1 per cent, and among men only 9.2 per cent.

The survey should have killed off the myth that poverty causes AIDS. For it turns out that the people most at risk of catching HIV are not poor illiterates living in the countryside, but the relatively rich and well-educated in the towns. The urban prevalence rate is 15.9 per cent, while in the countryside it is 9.2 per cent.

9.8 per cent of women and 7.2 per cent of men who had never completed primary education are HIV-positive. But for those with secondary or higher education, the figures are 15 per cent for women and 10.1 per cent for men. In the poorest wealth quintile, only six per cent are HIV-positive. In the richest quintile, the figure reaches 17.4 per cent.

The Monday Forum was organised by the media group SOICO, owners of the independent television station STV, and the daily paper "O Pais", and was financed by the US embassy.