Didn’t they have a myth that having sex with a virgin cures HIV?
Smithy2232 on
I had to google this and look into this. This is just crazy.
xanas263 on
Grew up in Zimbabwe and my parents said that they basically watched an entire generation of people die from HIV/AIDS in the 90s and early 2000s. Many companies and organisations lost whole divisions to it.
BellyCrawler on
As insane as this graph is, it still feels like it undersells what was on the ground. Anyone who grew up during the worst years of the AIDS crisis knows someone who was either infected or affected. A lot of families had multiple members who passed away from AIDS, and before the adoption of ARVs, a diagnosis was typically a death sentence.
It didn’t help that Zimbabwe suffered near unprecedented economic collapse around this time, which precipitated a similar collapse in the national healthcare system.
There was a joke that whenever a prominent figure died from AIDS, the state news would always announce that they “died after a long illness”. If the illness wasn’t specified, it was assumed to have been AIDS.
All this doesn’t even go into the fears and stigma that the disease was associated with, which only worsened the issue.
The AIDS crisis in Southern Africa is an under- discussed topic globally, as are most things that happen there.
MentalPlectrum on
Is the dip because Covid killed people instead? Or due to diminished recording?
Sunfurian_Zm on
Hot take: If the data is in “whole” percent (and not like 0.01% increments), using anything but 100% as the highest value immediately disqualifies it as beautiful.
veganontop on
Oh, thats why Bill Gates went there and circumsized a lot of dicks
Echo127 on
20% is still really really high. And it’s concerning that the declined has leveled out
NicePuddle on
I think it’s crazy that despite all the money and time spent on AIDS research, we still can’t cure it.
I know curing something that has so many variants is difficult, but it feels like it should be a solvable problem.
HeDoesNotRow on
Did they not know how it spread? I don’t know how easy/cheap it is to test for HIV but I feel like I would just be a virgin if this was happening around me. I guess eventually someone has to be having kids though
--zaxell-- on
Perspective: COVID was responsible for about 1/8 of deaths in the US from March 2020 to October 2021 (the first time range I happened to find data for, but it approximates the heart of the pandemic well enough). And that was *really* bad.
This peak is about 5x that. The idea of *most* deaths in a whole country over whole years being from a single cause is crazy.
dayburner on
Hope the US cutting off so much funding doesn’t cause a mass spike.
johnniewelker on
I’ll still not understand how so many people can be infected of aids that quickly. The infection rate is 1 out 250 for heterosexual sex and 10 out of 250 for gay sex for each act.
Still very low numbers. My guess is most people got infected through pregnancy or blood donation. These numbers are just too high
Bluepeasant on
Question if a person with AIDS died from COVID do they get counted as dying from AIDS, COVID or both.
Technically people don’t ‘die from AIDS’ they die from secondary infections (like COVID and numerous others) because AIDS has destroyed their immune system, so I wonder how it gets counted.
![[OC] Share of deaths caused by HIV/AIDS among all deaths in Botswana and Zimbabwe](https://www.byteseu.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/xkhmd8ptwrsg1-1237x1536.jpeg "[OC] Share of deaths caused by HIV/AIDS among all deaths in Botswana and Zimbabwe")
17 Comments
Data source: [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-aids?country=ZWE~Sub-Saharan+Africa~BWA](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-deaths-aids?country=ZWE~Sub-Saharan+Africa~BWA)
Tools used: Matplotlib + Gemini
Covid doing its best in the fight against AIDS.
Gotta hand it to George W. Bush
[President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief – Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/President%27s_Emergency_Plan_for_AIDS_Relief)
Didn’t they have a myth that having sex with a virgin cures HIV?
I had to google this and look into this. This is just crazy.
Grew up in Zimbabwe and my parents said that they basically watched an entire generation of people die from HIV/AIDS in the 90s and early 2000s. Many companies and organisations lost whole divisions to it.
As insane as this graph is, it still feels like it undersells what was on the ground. Anyone who grew up during the worst years of the AIDS crisis knows someone who was either infected or affected. A lot of families had multiple members who passed away from AIDS, and before the adoption of ARVs, a diagnosis was typically a death sentence.
It didn’t help that Zimbabwe suffered near unprecedented economic collapse around this time, which precipitated a similar collapse in the national healthcare system.
There was a joke that whenever a prominent figure died from AIDS, the state news would always announce that they “died after a long illness”. If the illness wasn’t specified, it was assumed to have been AIDS.
All this doesn’t even go into the fears and stigma that the disease was associated with, which only worsened the issue.
The AIDS crisis in Southern Africa is an under- discussed topic globally, as are most things that happen there.
Is the dip because Covid killed people instead? Or due to diminished recording?
Hot take: If the data is in “whole” percent (and not like 0.01% increments), using anything but 100% as the highest value immediately disqualifies it as beautiful.
Oh, thats why Bill Gates went there and circumsized a lot of dicks
20% is still really really high. And it’s concerning that the declined has leveled out
I think it’s crazy that despite all the money and time spent on AIDS research, we still can’t cure it.
I know curing something that has so many variants is difficult, but it feels like it should be a solvable problem.
Did they not know how it spread? I don’t know how easy/cheap it is to test for HIV but I feel like I would just be a virgin if this was happening around me. I guess eventually someone has to be having kids though
Perspective: COVID was responsible for about 1/8 of deaths in the US from March 2020 to October 2021 (the first time range I happened to find data for, but it approximates the heart of the pandemic well enough). And that was *really* bad.
This peak is about 5x that. The idea of *most* deaths in a whole country over whole years being from a single cause is crazy.
Hope the US cutting off so much funding doesn’t cause a mass spike.
I’ll still not understand how so many people can be infected of aids that quickly. The infection rate is 1 out 250 for heterosexual sex and 10 out of 250 for gay sex for each act.
Still very low numbers. My guess is most people got infected through pregnancy or blood donation. These numbers are just too high
Question if a person with AIDS died from COVID do they get counted as dying from AIDS, COVID or both.
Technically people don’t ‘die from AIDS’ they die from secondary infections (like COVID and numerous others) because AIDS has destroyed their immune system, so I wonder how it gets counted.