by Robert Houston, 10.23.2005 1:00pm. Excerpted from a post on New AIDS Review.

According to the CDC's June 2005 update, there are about 1.1 million Americans who are HIV positive (between 1 and 1.2 million). The 18,000 annual AIDS deaths would be only 1.6% of this population. This means an annual remainder of 98.4%.

A simple calculation (.984^43=.50) shows that at this rate of attrition it would take about 43 years on average for the HIV positives to die from AIDS (i.e. for half of them to succumb to one of the 30 or so old diseases that are called AIDS if the patient is HIV positive). Over four decades!

The median age of an initial HIV positive diagnosis is 37, based on the age distribution in the CDC data for 2003 (CDC, HIV/AIDS Surveillance Report, 2003, Table 1, p. 10). This means that the average age of death from AIDS would be about 80 (37+43).

But this is more than the average American lifespan! In other words, a diagnosis of HIV in America is compatible with a normal lifespan, assuming the patient isn't an early victim of overly aggressive antiretroviral treatment.

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