Timeline for Would an earlier HIV pandemic be a realistic, plausible historical apocalypse scenario?
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| Jul 3, 2018 at 14:44 | comment | added | Willk | Protease inhibitors were invented in 1996 and not widely adopted in Africa for another decade. Look only at the pre-2000 prevalence and death rates. The death rate is a steady 3-5% of the prevalence rate. Even with a prevalence of 20%+ in the late 1990s as you posit for your scenario HIV was not enough to push population into decline for these countries. HIV+ women still conceive and raise children and the maternal-fetal transfer rate is only 25%. For a Black Death scenario you need a second plague that kills outright all the HIV infected. | |
| Jul 3, 2018 at 2:05 | comment | added | Aquar1animal | But we're talking about an HIV pandemic more than sixty years before the very first antiviral drugs were developed. it's only thanks to the introduction of antiretroviral therapy that HIV-positive people can now live far longer than they used to be able to, and that the mortality rate greatly decreased. Before their introducion, people with HIV typically developed AIDS in just a few years, and without anti retroviral drug treatment, it's mortality rate was 80-90%. The population decline in Sub-Saharan Africa was arrested by its introduction. No such possibility exists in the 1920s. | |
| Jul 3, 2018 at 1:46 | history | answered | Willk | CC BY-SA 4.0 |