This isn't true, at least not in the southern and eastern African countries with very high HIV prevalence rates. Take Botswana for example: Assuming that prevalence rates stayed at 1999 levels, a boy who was 15 years old that year had a 90% of eventually dying of AIDS (this taking into account other sources of mortality). Granted, Botswana has the highest HIV rates in the world, but similar calculatations have been conducted for other countries and there is little doubt that HIV/AIDS will have an enormous demographic impact on many African countries.
The black plague theory about Delta 32 is questionable. Two published studies (one by me, in fact) have shown that it is not very plausible that the bubonic plague caused enough natural selection to have produced the modern day frequencies of the Delta 32 mutation in Europe. However, it is nearly certain that something did exert strong natural selection on Delta 32 in order for it to be at its current frequency. The leading contender would be some infectious disease (e.g. smallpox), but probably not plague.
Slashdot Mirror
This isn't true, at least not in the southern and eastern African countries with very high HIV prevalence rates. Take Botswana for example: Assuming that prevalence rates stayed at 1999 levels, a boy who was 15 years old that year had a 90% of eventually dying of AIDS (this taking into account other sources of mortality). Granted, Botswana has the highest HIV rates in the world, but similar calculatations have been conducted for other countries and there is little doubt that HIV/AIDS will have an enormous demographic impact on many African countries.
The black plague theory about Delta 32 is questionable. Two published studies (one by me, in fact) have shown that it is not very plausible that the bubonic plague caused enough natural selection to have produced the modern day frequencies of the Delta 32 mutation in Europe. However, it is nearly certain that something did exert strong natural selection on Delta 32 in order for it to be at its current frequency. The leading contender would be some infectious disease (e.g. smallpox), but probably not plague.