The condition and care of AIDS victims in Ghana : AIDS sufferers and their relations

The long incubation period of the disease means that, even if all HIV transmission were to halt immediately, the number of AIDS cases would continue to grow during the next decade at an average rate of ten per cent a year.

Abstract

So far substantial effort has been devoted to the basic research necessary for AIDS prevention and rightly too. What to do with the AIDS patients, the ultimate victims of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), until very recently, had remained almost exclusively the concern of health workers. Sufferers continue to be 'guinea pigs' in the hands of scientific and medical researchers in their frantic efforts to find a cure for the disease. But the long incubation period of the disease means that, even if all HIV transmission were to halt immediately, the number of AIDS cases would continue to grow during the next decade at an average rate of ten per cent a year (Panos Dossier 1992). That aside, the number of AIDSrelated deaths in some places has already reached alarming proportions, and the impact on families is already manifesting itself in many ways: increasing numbers of orphans, broken families, collapsing family enterprises, loss of family income, growing number of childheaded households, etc. (see Barnett and Blaikie 1992).