SOUTH AFRICA: South African cities are running out of burial space, according to cemetery officials faced with a rocketing death rate in the world's most AIDS-afflicted nation.
HIV/AIDS has infected 5.3 million of South Africa's 45 million people, the highest caseload in the world and still rising.
Because AIDS usually takes 10 or 11 years to kill a healthy 25-year-old, the large rise in HIV infections from the early 1990s is starting to take its toll. "About five years ago we were burying around eight bodies on a Saturday. Now we are burying anything between 45 and 50," said the head of cemeteries, in Thekwini, Durban, Mr Thembinkosi Ngcobo.
Most people do not admit they have HIV because the virus carries a strong social stigma.
"About 80 per cent of those 45 people will be young, between 18 and 30, and most of the time it will be because of 'natural causes'," Mr Ngcobo added. This week officials in Durban, the largest city in the worst-affected province of KwaZulu-Natal, said that the amount of land they need each year had doubled in the last decade to more than 12 hectares - roughly 12 football pitches.
The city's cemetery department said the graveyard boom was due to rising death rate "caused by the scourge of HIV/AIDS in our society".
In the capital, Pretoria, officials said all existing graveyards would be full by 2009, while Cape Town officials said the 33 hectares available would run out in two years. In Johannesburg the council is developing "super cemeteries" that will dwarf the massive Avalon graveyard in Soweto - a 172-hectare site where the sheer number of mourners causes huge traffic jams every weekend.
The shortage of grave space is starting to change antipathy toward cremation in the black community, where it is traditionally associated with the fires of hell.
But funeral directors say that in many areas fewer than 1 per cent of black people are cremated.
South Africa last year approved a national anti-retroviral treatment programme after intense domestic and international pressure and began a slow roll out of the drugs earlier this year.
Last year Cape Town University estimated 420,000 AIDS-related deaths in 2003 would rise to 710,000 a year by 2009 without effective anti-retroviral treatment for all.