It’s one of my favorite questions to ask whenever I talk about Gapminder in class:
Why did South Africa write the letter “U” over the last thirty years?
It’s one of my favorite questions to ask for two reasons, and both are related to each other. First, hardly anybody gets the correct answer. Second, the fact that hardly anybody gets it pleases me no end.
That’s an unusual thing for a teacher to say. How can absence of knowledge make the teacher happy?
But in this case, it really and truly is a wonderful thing. And the reason it is a wonderful thing is because AIDS today simply isn’t as big a concern as it used to be at one point of time.
One way to understand this chart is to come to the sobering conclusion that South Africa is only now getting back to life expectancy levels it last saw in the early 1990’s.
But hey, at least it’s getting back to those levels, huh?
And in more excellent news, we learn via Saloni Dattani’s awesome (and very, very welcome) blog post that life expectancy for folks with AIDS who are on AntiRetroViral (ARV) therapy is about as much as it is for folks who don’t have AIDS.
Or, in simpler terms, AIDS seems to be a solved problem.
For people with HIV on ART and with high CD4 cell counts who survived to 2015 or started ART after 2015, life expectancy was only a few years lower than that in the general population, irrespective of when ART was started. However, for people with low CD4 counts at the start of follow-up, life-expectancy estimates were substantially lower, emphasising the continuing importance of early diagnosis and sustained treatment of HIV.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanhiv/article/PIIS2352-3018(23)00028-0/fulltext
The reason I say “seems to be”, rather than “is”, is simply because I do not know enough to be able to make a definitive statement. But this much I can say with confidence: this is definitely very good news.
And god knows we could do an extra large helping of good news.
Please, do consider subscribing to Saloni’s excellent blog!
EconForEverybody 