AIDS kills about 10 people every hour in Malawi and the government of the impoverished southern African nation is increasingly unable to cope with the crisis, Health Minister Heatherwick Ntaba said. "This is a disaster because it means that the country is losing 240 people every day to HIV/AIDS and at the end of 10 years an estimated 876,000 will die if the trend continues," Ntaba said in an interview late on Monday. Malawi, with a population of about 11 million, is one of the countries at the center of the AIDS pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa, which is home to almost two-thirds of those infected with HIV/AIDS worldwide. The government estimates that about 1 million Malawians are infected with the HIV virus and about 640,000 have died from AIDS-related causes since 1985.
