HIV impact on Zimbabwe less than some feared-study

LONDON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - HIV has slashed life expectancy in Zimbabwe by up to 19 years for men and 22 years for women but births still outpace deaths, according to the first study to detail how the AIDS epidemic has impacted the country's wider population.

The study, led by Simon Gregson of Imperial College London, sought to gauge HIV's impact on Zimbabwe to see if researchers got it right in 1989, at the beginning of the epidemic, when they made initial predictions about how AIDS would affect populations in sub-Saharan Africa.

Our research shows that, in spite of countless people having lost their lives to the virus, more people are still being born than are dying," Gregson said.

But Gregson's team wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the effects of HIV/AIDS in Zimbabwe were "substantial and still unfolding".read more