Sub-Saharan Africa's HIV pandemic

Abstract

Longitudinal studies and household surveys suggest that sub-Saharan Africa's (SSA's) HIV/AIDS crisis is not a pandemic of the poor but rather one of inequalities, where wealthier individuals are more likely to be infected as a result of greater mobility and multiple relationships (Fox, 2012). This is in sharp contrast to the situation in the United States, where HIV infections "are concentrated among the poor with very few people in the middle and upper social strata contracting HIV" (Pellowski, Kalichman, Matthews, & Adler, May-June 2013, p. 199). Yet from a global perspective, wherein SSA is the poorest region in the world, the pandemic is of course one of poverty as well as one with pronounced racial and gender disparities. Both the May-June 2013 special issue of the American Psychologist ("HIV/AIDS: Social Determinants and Health Disparities") and another American Psychologist special issue 25 years earlier ("Psychology and AIDS," November 1988) help shed light on Africa's HIV/AIDS crisis.