Russians still dwindle
Russia’s diminishing population- plagued by economic crisis, social upheaval, a breakdown of the nation’s medical system and a sharply increased rate of alcohol consumption – shrank by another 264,000 over the first six months of 1997.
A new report from the State Statistics Committee said that a low birth rate and high mortality rate was behind the steady seven-year decline in the population, which totaled 147.2 million on l July.
The report noted that on the average deaths exceeded births by 1.6 times, although in some regions the ration was as high as 2.7 times.
The report placed the average number of children born to each Russian woman over a reproductive lifetime at just 1.3, a level equal to that of Italy, another nation experiencing population decline.
During the years 1990-1995, 3.7 million fewer Russian babies were born than in the proceeding 5-year period, 1985-1990. At the same time the death rate accelerated, leaving Russia with a mortality rate of 15.1 deaths per 1,000 population, a figure that places Russia ahead of only Afghanistan and Cambodia among the nations of Europe and Asia in death. The current Russian death rate among working-age people is higher than it was 100 years ago, while life expectancy for men, 59 years, is lower than in any other developed country.
(The Washington Times, 31 August, A6; The New York Times, 26 August. A1, 8.)
AIDS cases soar in South Africa
The spread of HIV and AIDS in South Africa has reached startling dimensions, with some 2.4 million people now infected with the HIV virus, a level three times that of the United States which has nearly six times South Africa’s population.
Since 1991, the rate of HIV infection among pregnant South African women has spiraled from one percent to a staggering 14 percent, according to statistics from the nation’s Department of Health. Within the next five to ten years, some estimates predict that the figure will reach one in four pregnant women. As a result, life expectancy is expected to plunge from the current 63 years to perhaps as low as just 40 years.
South Africa is now confronting the epidemic that central and east Africans have faced for over a decade. Some 14 million people in sub-Saharan Africa now live with HIV or AIDS, nearly two-thirds of the world’s total.
(“Southern Africa’s unmentionable curse,” The Economist, 5 July, 47-8.)
New York Times discovers Chinese demographic problem
The New York Times, never a publication known to mourn abortion or infanticide, published a column on 30 October by Bob Herbert. “There has never been the kind of international outcry that there should be over the girls who are missing from the population of China,” Herbert declared, adding, “[t]he world has largely closed its eyes to this immense tragedy.”
A cultural preference for boys and China’s ruthlessly enforced childbearing restrictions have resulted in the wholesale destruction of girl babies through gross neglect, abandonment, infanticide and, in recent years, the targeted abortion of female fetuses, Herbert said.
Herbert quoted Susan Greenhalgh, an anthropologist from the University of California at Irvine who has studied this problem for a number of years. She described the situation as “frightening.” In a paper that she co-wrote two years ago with the demographer Jiali Li, Ms. Greenhalgh said that little girls were being eliminated from Chinese society “on a massive scale.”
Herbert also quoted demographer William Lavely, of the University of Washington, who has studied Chinese census data. Citing statistics from a Chinese census sampling in 1995, Mr. Lavely noted that among 4-year-olds there are 115 boys for every 100 girls; among 3-year-olds, 119 boys per 100 girls; among 2-year-olds, 121 boys; among 1-year-olds, 121 boys; and among children less than a year old, 116 boys per 100 girls. (“In America,” The New York Times, 30 October 1997.)
