Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The connections between human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and population features are vast. While HIV has its largest impacts on population size and structure by increasing mortality among young adults, it also affects and interacts with the other key components of population makeup and change, namely, sexual behavior and fertility, and migration. Impacts on these key components in turn affect the well-being of populations in profound ways. Recent reports estimate that HIV has infected over 60 million persons worldwide, killing more than 25 million of them through the various complications associated with acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS), the disease caused by HIV. The toll has been especially heavy in the developing world, where infection rates are highest and where effective medications are the least available. The introduction and spread of HIV across the globe is a fairly recent phenomenon and caught public health, population, and other social scientists by surprise. Although it is now thought that the virus probably existed in Africa for a number of years before it emerged within gay male populations in America and Europe, it was not until the early 1980s that this new deadly and infectious disease caught the attention of a scientific community heretofore convinced that the age of epidemics was nearing completion. It is not just the epidemiological transition paradigm ... log in or subscribe to read full text