mardi 10 novembre 2015

Mortality of HIV-positive people - very low!?

In the news yesterday here in Germany is a press release by the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) about HIV statistics/estimates for 2014.
http://ift.tt/1WKyfLD

The numbers are, quickly:
  • 83,400 people in Germany are HIV-positive
  • 13,200 of these do not know yet that they are positive
  • 3,200 people were newly infected during 2014
  • 480 HIV-positive people have died in 2014
As the second number makes apparent, these numbers are not based on registered cases but are estimates including the dark field.
They don't specify whether the 480 death cases were from AIDS-related deseases and complication or include all causes of death (such as accidents) - I assume the latter.

What surprised me is the realisation that only 1 in 174 infected people (or 5.8 per 1,000) die per year - that's half the mortality rate of the general population at large (11.3 per 1,000)!
A big part of the reason for this is of course that few HIV-positive people can be expected to be older than, say, 65 years - infections are still most prevalent among sexually active gay men, followed by heterosexually active folks, and then, I think, IV drug users. These demoscopics "favour" younger age brackets.

Still - the numbers belie the impression that AIDS is a great killer. Perhaps I am the last to have heard the news, but ... apparently, medication works really well, even if there is no cure yet!

(I searched for an open HIV thread before operning this. The last post in this subforum within a thread tagged "hiv" was more than 2 years ago! Not a big issue these days, eh?)


via International Skeptics Forum http://ift.tt/1QrwPkc

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