Introduction

In this post we will have a look at the HIV incidence per 1000 population. So if country A has an incidence of 0.05 it means that 50 out of 1000 individuals are infected with HIV in country A. Different countries have different incidence rates and it will be made clear when we plot the numbers on the map. First we need to know what is HIV?

What is HIV?

"Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) is an infection that attacks the body’s immune system. Acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is the most advanced stage of the disease. HIV targets the body’s white blood cells, weakening the immune system. This makes it easier to get sick with diseases like tuberculosis, infections and some cancers." - https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/hiv-aids

The world

Below we can see the incidence rates for the different countries.

The above shows that most of the countries' incidence rates are low with Africa having the most prevalence. Lets focus more on Africa.

Africa

From the above we can see that southern Africa is the most prevalent by far. By how far? We do not know yet. We will get a better picture if we divide Africa into regions.

African regions

By splitting Africa into regions we can see how the regions differ and how they have progressed in the level of incidence.

Southern Africa is showing a general downtrend but has the highest incidence by far overall. Central and eastern Africa has a downtrend but have the second highest incidence at and nearing 2022. Three out of the four north African countries show an uptrend but they display the lowest incident rate from 1990 until 2022. Lastly, we will take the medians for each region and plot it with the median for all the African countries.

Africa median vs the medians of the 5 regions

The median for Africa is 0.5391 per 1000 incidence in the year of 2022 but you will have to zoom in for that(better go to the kaggle dataset: here ). After grouping the African countries into regions it shows that southern Africa has an median incidence of 5.0413 which almost six and a half times more HIV incidence per 1000 individuals than the region in second place(East Africa - 0.780178) and 9.35 time more than the African median for the year of 2022.

What can be the main drivers for theses high numbers in southern Africa? This article may shed some light.