Is HIV a time bomb under the mining industry?

By Anna Stablum

LONDON (Reuters) - From Africa to Russia, from Peru to China, mining companies face a problem: the workers who haul up the earth's riches are coming down with AIDS, and it is hampering operations at a time of booming demand for minerals.

"The epidemic is extremely severe, it's worse than any of us admit to, there are a lot of undiagnosed cases that don't get reported," Brian Brink, medical senior vice-president at Anglo American's South Africa operations, told Reuters.

He said Anglo, the world's fourth largest mining group, realized it had a problem at its mines 21 years ago when four of its 18,450 South African workers tested positive for the virus.

Over two decades later, with up to one in three infected and South Africa the centre of a global pandemic, the firm says its own prevention efforts failed.

"We didn't stop this epidemic. In fact if I was to look back and score ourselves, I think we get zero," Brink said.

Worldwide the disease has killed some 30 million people, double the amount of casualties in World War One. Miners are anxious to build on lessons learned in South Africa to try to stem the tide elsewhere.

The world's fourth biggest gold producer, Gold Fields, has estimated the total cost from HIV at around $5 per ounce of gold produced in South Africa, and even with gold trading at around $650 per ounce the cost is significant.

AIDS is growing fastest in Eastern Europe and Central Asia where the number of people living with HIV has grown 20-fold in less than a decade, according to the United Nations.

In Russia, the infection rate has more than doubled in two years to 1.2 million in 2005 and in the country's fifth largest gold mining area, Irkutsk, the rate is more than three times the Russian average, UNDP data showed.

In India, there are many patches where the population's infection rate is above 1 percent.

"In the early 1990s that (one percent) is where we were and then it is very difficult to stop," Brink said.

The HIV infection rate among South African miners is now nearly double that of the general working population.

In China, the U.N. estimated 650,000 people were infected in 2005, up by 23 percent in two years. If that spread continues, some 1.9 million people will be infected in China by 2015.

"They (other countries) must not fall into the same trap as South Africa," said Lennox Mekuto, Health and Safety Officer for the National Union of Mineworkers in South Africa.

In May this year health experts from seven mining giants met for the first time in London, forming a group to come up with an improved strategy on how to halt the spread of AIDS.