PORT MORESBY (Pacnews) — Papua New Guinea is facing a health disaster that could decimate its population and in the process cripple its government and economy.
According to Radio Australia, an Australian study has indicated that PNG is on the brink of a HIV/AIDS epidemic and that as many as four in 10 could die from AIDS by the year 2020—an equivalent of some 124,000 persons.
The report, prepared for the Australian government’s foreign aid bureau, AusAID, predicted that for every known case of HIV/AIDS, there could four unknown cases. However, the “real ratio could be 20 unknown cases for every one that’s been detected.”
Dr. Jenny Gordon, of the Center for International Economists, said the economic impact of the catastrophe would be difficult to fathom at the moment, both from the economic and social perspective.
“If you’re losing your adult population you’re left with what we call a stove-pipe population. So you have a lot more dependents per working-age person and that flows through to in a lot of ways, impacting on the government and on households and on the broader investment environment,” she said.
“The stove-pipe means you have lots of kids, a few old people and very few adult people working and this leads to a lot of different implications. It means you’ve got less household income per household. It means you’re going to have households making decisions about whether they send children to school, or make them go to work because they don’t have adults to do the work,” she added.
“It also means you’ve got a lot of sick people in the community as well who will be demanding health care or needing health care services,” Gordon said.
She warned the disease would result in a shortage of skilled and semi-skilled workers, leading to a breakdown in many institutions, even impacting on the subsistence economy.
The Australian study, which has been given to the PNG government for its consideration, estimated that the disease would leave only four out of 10 workers in the workforce.
“The pressure on those workers, because they would be supporting more young and elderly people, would be quite considerable, so the humanitarian crises that have happened with the drought in PNG, with the tsunami, those things are going to get much worse and the PNG government will have even less capability, certainly on the income side, and potentially also on the organizational side to deal with those kinds of crises,” Gordon said.
