AIDS and business a cause for concern - report

South African companies are starting to feel the impact of HIV/AIDS and urgently need to speed up programmes to deal with the pandemic, an independent survey has found. The research was conducted by the South African Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS (SABCOHA) among 1,006 firms, of which nine percent reported a "significant" adverse impact on their business, while 43 percent only saw this happening in five years' time. In a statement SABCOHA said small and medium enterprises were a vital source of jobs, and in a country with an unemployment rate of over 30 percent, this was a major cause for concern. SABCOHA also noted that most firms had failed to respond to the epidemic, with only a quarter of all those surveyed having a formal HIV/AIDS policy, while less than a fifth had a voluntary counselling and testing programme.