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To: Moominoid who wrote (62290)	1/28/2001 3:15:30 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Hi David Stern; You wrote: "Somewhere today I read that life expectancy for black men in SA has fallen to 36 years." Either you remember wrong, or someone put a statistic up that is wrong. AIDS is a problem, but in order to drop the life expectancy for men in South Africa to 36 years, you would have to infect considerably above 10% of the population: The Aids epidemic in South Africa has reached alarming new levels, with 10% of the population now infected with HIV. aegis.com Other estimates give the HIV level at 15%. Even if you assume that all that 15% is concentrated in the male population, and that the resulting AIDS kills all those men at age 25, (neither of which is at all realistic), and if you assume that the life expectancy for men without AIDS is, say, 55 years, then the result of AIDS would be to drop the life expectancy from 55 years to 250.30 + 550.70 = 46 years. To get to 36 years you are going to have to achieve exposure rates well above 50%. What's happening here is that a political group is attempting to maximize spending on AIDS research by exaggerating the problem. Yes, the problem is huge, but no, the life expectancy hasn't dropped to 36 years. A link with the actual SA life expectancy: The overall life expectancy in sub-Saharan Africa has dropped precipitously over the past 10 years, mostly because of the AIDS epidemic, the WHO says. Life expectancy dropped for female babies from 51.1 years to 46.3 years. For males, the level dropped from 47.3 years to 44.8 years. primenet.com Even these numbers are probably not to be believed. Here's the latest numbers from WHO, which organization also has a reason to exaggerate problems: Life Expectancy: (1997) 54.4 male, 58.2 female usaid.gov This is a bit higher than the CIA says, for 2000, the difference may be due to AIDS: male: 50.41 years, female: 51.81 years (2000 est.) cia.gov The figure for 36 years probably is an estimate for some future date that involves a lot of (panic inducing) guess work. But not for now. I saw one website that gave estimates for number of years of "healthy" life, for instance, and those are considerably shorter than total life. -- Carl