Possible demographic consequences of AIDS in developing countries

Abstract

Simple mathematical models of the transmission dynamics of HIV that incorporate demographic and epidemiological processes to assess the potential impact of AIDS on human population growth and structure in developing countries suggest that AIDS is capable of changing population growth rates from positive to negative values over timescales of a few decades. The disease is predicted to have little if any impact on the dependency ratio of a population, defined as the number of children below age 15 years and elderly people over 64 years, divided by the number of adults between 15 to 64 years.