ADDIS ABABA: Even without AIDS and HIV, Africa’s 800 million people are the world’s unhealthiest, experts said on Tuesday.

The African Health Sciences Congress, an annual meeting of experts, said in a report that improvements in African healthcare in the 1960s and 1970s had in many cases been lost due to poverty.

“In spite of the availability of suitable tools and technology for prevention and treatment, poverty and weak health systems have worsened health problems in Africa,” said the report released at the gathering in the Ethiopian capital.

In addition to unnecessary deaths and suffering, it said economic development and the social fabric were being undermined by poor health, and it called on African countries to set up workable systems to respond promptly to threats from disease.

HIV/AIDS presented the continent with an unprecedented challenge, the report added, saying the epidemic had reversed gains made in African life expectancy over the last half century.

“Life expectancy in the most severely affected countries has been reduced by almost a third, from 60 years to 43 years — 2.4 million people died from AIDS in 2002 and around 3.5 million new infections occurred,” it said.—Reuters