Mail & Guardian (Johannesburg) - March 2, 2005
Christina Scott**

Jeremy Magruder, a young American economist at the University of Cape Town's Centre for Social Science Research, thinks so.

"Registered deaths among women in South Africa peak quite sharply from ages 25 to 35," says Magdruder, who is completing his PhD at Yale University in the United States. "But they decline to rates which are no different from the era before HIV by the time they reach the ages of 50 to 55."

The classic explanation is that a core group of frisky, risky chancers may be transmitting the incurable virus among themselves but Magruder suspects that something far more "normal" is pushing the infection: dating, with a view to marriage.

"The average age of first marriage for women is 25 in South Africa," he explains. "The deaths suggests that most infections may take place either while women are single or from infections that their spouse incurred before marriage."

Naturally, men are also at risk, but there are significant differences in the death statistics.

The peak death rate for husbands, fuelled by Aids-related opportunistic infections, begins later -- in their early thirties -- but carries on for much longer than it does for their wives, until the age of about 45 to 50.

"This suggests that marriage is important for men as well, who seem to be about five years older than women when they first marry," suggests Magruder.

"Also, men marry over a longer interval of time. However, quite frankly, I'm looking mostly at women because we have better information on them."

In the same way that many young people job-hop before settling down at a workplace, he thinks that young men and women are "trying out a variety of potential partnerships before they settle on their spouse".

Without condoms, this means that marriage may last until an Aids-related death parts the couple.

This is not to say that older women are safer, or that married couples are protected from HIV/Aids, but that young women in the dating game are particularly vulnerable -- partly because their partners may be highly infectious and totally oblivious to the fact, and partly because they may be "surfing" the wave of eligible bachelors in order to find their one and only. There's still much to learn.

"On one level, reading about deaths all day isn't the most uplifting thing," Magruder says, gesturing to the data on his computer. "But it's important to try to understand it."

However, some of Magruder's colleagues from the Centre for Social Science Research were considerably more cautious, pointing out that his argument didn't necessarily work for data from the rest of Africa. In addition, further work needs to be done because the implications posed by South Africa's astoundingly high rate of sexual abuse of children and female teenagers - according to some reports, as many as half of all South Africa's women have their first sexual encounter forced upon them. These rapes, which clearly do not involve the use of condoms, in a country considered the epicentre of the AIDS epidemic, would have significant bearings on Magruder's argument.

Meanwhile, AIDS researcher Hein Marais will speak at the next seminar in the 2005 Centre for Social Science Research series at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Marais was until recently chief writer for the Joint UN Programme on HIV/AIDS. He has authored numerous publications, including the annual AIDS epidemic updates issued by the UNAIDS/WHO, and wrote also the book 'South Africa: Limits to Change - The Political-Economy of Transition.'

Marais will present brief sketches of the current trends of the epidemic in the major regions, highlighting emerging similarities and counter-intuitive patterns, with emphasis on the various trends in sub-Saharan Africa. He will discuss the abject failure of prevention programmes in southern Africa to date, and the likely reasons for the unique scale and severity of the epidemics in the sub-region.

And sociologist Professor Jeremy Seekings will be presenting the first wave of data, including new information on AIDS stigma, from a broad-based, long-range study of Cape Town youth, at a workshop on March 11 and 12 at the University of Cape Town. The Cape Area Panel Study is considered the first long-term survey tracking the attitudes and problems facing teenagers and young adults in South Africa, and has run since 2002. The next wave of interviews happens this year.

For more information, go to http://www.cssr.uct.ac.za/

** Christina Scott is the Africa consultant for the Science and Development Network website, the developing world's leading source of science news, online at www.scidev.net. She writes this in her personal capacity.

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