In Zimbabwe, Fewer Affairs And Less HIV

Muza earns 2.5 million Zimbabwean dollars a month teaching, and about half goes to the rent, groceries and other expenses of his "small house."

"It's very difficult," Muza said softly, his voice trailing off.

Changing Behavior

With rich reddish soil, steady sunshine and seemingly enlightened governance, Zimbabwe for two decades was regarded as the economic miracle of southern Africa.

President Robert Mugabe, who took over in 1980 from a white-supremacist government, invested heavily in education. Plentiful commercial farms made Zimbabwe an exporter of food. A steady flow of foreign tourists visited the country's unspoiled game parks and Victoria Falls, a mile-wide torrent of water considered one of the world's natural wonders.

But faced with rising political opposition, Mugabe in 2000 endorsed invasions of white-owned commercial farms by landless black peasants. The move won him some support but led to economic ruin and growing political repression. Zimbabwe became one of the world's biggest recipients of international food aid. Its currency tumbled so fast that the money used to buy a new car in 2000 would be worth less than a U.S. penny now.

Many AIDS experts feared this turmoil would worsen an epidemic that already was among the most severe in the world.

Yet in 2005, the U.N. AIDS agency reported that the country had experienced southern Africa's first major decline in HIV. The drop was clearest among pregnant women who attended prenatal clinics, but studies of other groups showed similar trends.

The most recent nationwide survey, conducted in 2005 and 2006, put Zimbabwe's HIV rate for adults at 18.1 percent, still higher than in all but five other countries in the world. Researchers believe it peaked a few years earlier at about 25 percent.

This shift came despite Zimbabwe's pariah status at a time when growing international funding has allowed other African countries to dramatically expand their efforts to combat the epidemic. When President Bush created his $15 billion anti-AIDS program, all of Zimbabwe's neighbors -- South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique and Zambia -- were cited as "focus countries" worthy of extra support.

Zimbabwe, which Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice labeled an "outpost of tyranny," was not, making it one of Africa's least popular recipients of foreign aid. Botswana and Uganda have received 10 times more annual financial support for each person living with HIV than has Zimbabwe, a U.N. analysis showed.

Among the initial skeptics about the falling HIV rate was Zimbabwean AIDS researcher Exnevia Gomo. He recalled the early speculation: Perhaps it was caused by a surge of death in the absence of effective treatment. Or maybe the exodus of young, well-educated people to other countries explained the trend.

But several studies show that shifts in sexual behavior drove the HIV decline in Zimbabwe. This finding echoes the changes experienced in Uganda during the early 1990s, when its rate of new infections fell sharply.