Mortality
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he obvious impact of the disease, and the reason that it is so feared, is that nearly everyone who is injected is doomed to die. Two modifying points should be made with regard to sub - Saharan Africa. The first is that few people know that they are injected until they are in the final symptomatic stage, perhaps less than five per cent. Some were knew because they die as the first symptoms develop. This may lead to great peace of mind and is a situation apparently preferred by most of the population, but it radically reduces the possibility of intervening to reduce the level of transmission.
The record is that the duration of the latency and symptomatic periods is closer to the situation in the west of the 1980s - that before large -scale use of medication - than was once feared.
The implied AIDS mortality in the main AIDS belt is staggering. Blauker and Zaba show that in Kenya, even present HIV levels mean that one - third reaching adulthood in this population will die of AIDS. They show that the chance of dying of AIDS is related to both the seroprevalence level and the life expectancy prior to the epidemic. Kenya, with a life expectancy of 54 years, compared with an East African average of 47 years (United Nations 1966), has relatively low mortality from other causes at each age. Where seroprevalence is higher, in the Honde Valley of Zimbabwe Gregson et al. (1996 13ff) calculate that 50 per cent of each cohort of women will die of AIDS before 50 years of age. Unfortunately, studies revealed that 46 per cent of persons with symptomatic AID and 32 per cent of those suffering from other illnesses blamed witchcraft (Boerma et al)