Scaling-up spatiotemporal dynamics of HIV/AIDS prevalence rates of Sub-Saharan African countries

Abstract

With approximately two in three global HIV/AIDS cases, Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) countries are enduring enormous HIV/AIDS disease burden. This study used GIS to investigate the spatiotemporal of variability of HIV/AIDS prevalence rates of SSA countries. Data acquired from the UNAIDS Global Report and World Reference Database are used for geospatial analysis, longitudinal study and modelling. Accordingly, in SSA, on average, 5.75% of the adult population were infected in 2014. The epidemics were relatively lower in the western (μ = 1.8 ± SD = 0.28) and eastern (μ = 2.4 ± SD = 5.3); average in the central (μ = 3.15 ± SD = 2.0) and significantly (p = 0.05) higher in the southern African countries (μ = 16.4 ± SD = 60). There is an encouraging trend of significant (i.e., R2 = 0.60; α = 0.05) decline between 2001 and 2014, although the strength of decline vary from country to country.