AIDS IN AFRICA

As recently as 1990, there were some regions of the world that had remained relatively unscathed by AIDS. Today, however, there is not a single country around the world which has wholly escaped the AIDS epidemic. As the epidemic has matured, some of the developed nations which were hard hit by the epidemic in the 1980s such as the United States have reported a slowing in the rate of new infections and a stabilization among existing cases with lower mortality rates and an extension of post-diagnosis lifespan. However, despite the changing face of the global AIDS pandemic, one factor remains unchanged: no region of the world bears a higher AIDS-related burden than sub-Saharan Africa. This paper examines the demographic effects of AIDS in Africa, focusing on the hardest-hit countries of sub-Saharan Africa and considers the present and future impact of the AIDS epidemic on major demographic measures such as fertility, mortality, life expectancy, gender, age, and family structure. Although ...