>But to the point: the major driver of the early explosion of HIV on the continent was almost certainly large-scale vaccination and medical treatment campaigns by colonial governments, which injected staggering numbers of people in rural areas without adequate disinfection of needles.
Colonial governments were mostly out of Africa after the 1960s.
>In the present, the sociological drivers of HIV spread do include rates of nonconsensual sex (particularly between teen girls and older men). More important factors, however, are historical and contemporary patterns of urban/rural migration and long-distance transit networks. The distinctive forms of cyclical migration created by the shape of the mining industry in apartheid South Africa are the largest reason that the pandemic is so much worse in that region than anywhere else on the continent.
That's being very disingenuous. What makes periodic migration by miners in South Africa different from large-scale worker migrations elsewhere in the world? Mexican farm workers to the US, half of China, or for that matter Canadian, Russian, and Australian miners, or oil-rig workers everywhere. It's not so much the migration patterns, but what the migrants do (or don't do) when "back home".
> Colonial governments were mostly out of Africa after the 1960s.
HIV was probably spreading in the Belgian Congo in the 1920s. It likely spread to the US in the 60s. It takes a decade for HIV to turn into AIDS, which is why we think of the pandemic as starting in the 80s.
The median time is a little longer than that, but the range goes down to less than a year. We think about it as starting in the 1980s because that's when the diverse manifestations were recognized as a common syndrome, not because that's when symptoms first appeared in the US (in fact, there is a case retroactively identified as a death from full-blown AIDS in the US in 1969.)
Colonial governments were mostly out of Africa after the 1960s.
>In the present, the sociological drivers of HIV spread do include rates of nonconsensual sex (particularly between teen girls and older men). More important factors, however, are historical and contemporary patterns of urban/rural migration and long-distance transit networks. The distinctive forms of cyclical migration created by the shape of the mining industry in apartheid South Africa are the largest reason that the pandemic is so much worse in that region than anywhere else on the continent.
That's being very disingenuous. What makes periodic migration by miners in South Africa different from large-scale worker migrations elsewhere in the world? Mexican farm workers to the US, half of China, or for that matter Canadian, Russian, and Australian miners, or oil-rig workers everywhere. It's not so much the migration patterns, but what the migrants do (or don't do) when "back home".