Substantially more young people in their prime are dying and it's probably due to HIV infection, Statistics SA said on Thursday.

"For some sex-age groups and some causes of death the increase in death rates between 1997 and 2004 has been truly astounding," said Stats SA in its 200-page report on Adult Mortality.

The report looks at deaths for people aged 15-to-64 from 1997 to 2004.

"This large increase in death rates has occurred for several causes of death for both males and females. It is concentrated in ages 20-to-44 and especially for communicable diseases," it said.

It also occurs for some non-communicable diseases that exhibit an age pattern of mortality similar to HIV and that likely include a high proportion of deaths that are due to HIV.

Overall, the report said, death rates rose for every five-year age group for each sex, except for males aged 15-to-19.

The death rates more than tripled for females age 20 to 39 and more than doubled for males aged 30-to-44.

However, the report could not definitively attribute the huge increase in deaths to HIV but said this was the probable cause.

Death rates from deaths registered as HIV-related "increased greatly between 1997 and 2004".

It said it was clear that not all HIV-related deaths were reported as such on the death notification forms.

HIV death rates had a distinctive pattern by age in which there was an increase to a given age and then a rapid decline at older ages.

The peak occurs at 30-to-34 for females and at 35-to-39 for males. It is clear that many HIV deaths are registered as being due to some other cause of death, according to the report.

Stats SA said it was likely that a "high proportion" of deaths registered as due to parasitic diseases or infections, certain immune system disorders and, for women, maternal conditions, were actually caused by HIV.

Source: Xinhua